The UK arm of Festo, the German family-owned automation company, based in Northampton and supplying pneumatic and electric automation and technical training.
Festo makes the components that move things in factories. Its products include pneumatics, which use compressed air to push and grip, along with electric drives, valves, grippers and control software. A UK trade listing says Festo offers around 36,000 pneumatic and electric products, many of which can be tailored to a customer's needs. The group also runs Festo Didactic, which provides technical education and training for schools, colleges, universities and industry. Its machines end up in packaging lines, car factories, food plants and laboratories.
The group began in 1925, when Albert Fezer and Gottlieb Stoll founded a woodworking machine company in Esslingen, Germany. The name Festo comes from their surnames. The business moved into pneumatics in the 1950s, and remains family-owned, with about 20,600 employees in 2025 according to Wikipedia. We found no formal mission statement. The UK trade listing names sustainability, lower carbon emissions, digital learning, innovation, performance and speed as priorities, and the UK education pages say the company is "firmly committed to inspiring and developing young engineers for the future".
Festo Limited is based at Caswell Road, Brackmills Industrial Estate, Northampton, in what its UK pages call the Applied Automation Centre. The same site hosts school visits. Its UK entry is listed under the trade bodies BARA and PPMA, which are part of Automate UK. The pages we read name no other UK sites. The company's bionic research, which studies animal movement to find ideas for factory machines, is carried out in Germany rather than in Britain.
The UK education pages describe Festo STEM Ambassadors hosting school groups at the Northampton site, with two sessions a month during term time, each for up to 18 students. Visits include talks, a tour of an exhibition room where automation is shown in action, and hands-on pneumatic circuit workshops adapted for Year 7 to Year 13. The company says this is part of helping to reduce the skills gap. A listing also names UK managers, but as such details date quickly, we do not rely on them.
Jobs in a company like this include sales and applications engineers who help customers pick and set up equipment, technical trainers, control systems and software engineers, product managers, logistics staff and finance and marketing teams. Subjects such as maths, physics, computing and design and technology are all relevant. It is a good example of a business whose products are mostly hidden inside other machines, but which keeps UK industry running.
Website: www.festo.com/gb/en
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