­Armed only with a phone, a desk, a dream and a vision, tousle-haired young Karsten Frahn decided that the office under the stairs at his home in Coventry was too small and moved into a slightly less small office in Leamington Spa in the English Midlands, determined to build his business in clamp-on flowmeters. 

Katronic’s Managing Director, Andrew Sutton, was also its first employee after Karsten rescued him from life in a bank, which makes him now the go-to guy for information on everything from application details and the further reaches of the product menu system to the finer details of the company coffee machine. Instead of filling in forms and refusing people mortgages, Andy has spent his working life down holes, being dropped onto oil rigs and clamping onto water pipes all over the world.

Twenty-five years on, Katronic is a globe-spanning instrumentation business, with a much bigger office and factory, far more people, more than one phone, and subsidiaries in Union, New Jersey and Vaunaveys-la-Rochette, which is in that excellent part of southern France where the wine is incredible and they play rugby. Karsten himself, now minus the tousle hair, established an office in his hometown of Wernigerode, in Eastern Germany, where R&D now lives and new product developments flow. Katronic flowmeters are sold all over the world through a network of distributors, for everything from mining operations in South America and petrochemicals in Kazakhstan, plastics in South Africa to sewage treatment in South London.

As we continue to grow and develop, we remain very grateful to the great team of people we work with – our staff, our global partners, our customers and suppliers. We’re excited to see where we go next.

Keep calm – and clamp on!