A Birmingham-headquartered engineering group with Victorian roots that designs motion and fluid control technology for industry, with the purpose 'Breakthrough engineering for a better world'.
IMI plc is an engineering company based near Birmingham. It describes itself with the purpose 'Breakthrough engineering for a better world'. After the sale of two non-core businesses in 2013, it focused on motion and fluid control, which means the valves, actuators and control systems that decide how air, liquids and gases move through machines and buildings. According to Wikipedia its operations are grouped into five sectors: process automation, industrial automation, climate control, life science and fluid control, and transport. In 2022 it added Heatmiser, a maker of smart thermostats for homes.
IMI's roots go back to 1862, when George Kynoch, a Scottish entrepreneur, opened a percussion cap factory at Witton in Birmingham. The business later moved into metals, bicycle parts and even soap, built up expertise in metallurgy, and became part of the creation of ICI in 1927. During the Second World War the Witton site did work on uranium for the Tube Alloys project, and in the 1950s researchers there helped develop a way of producing titanium. The name Imperial Metal Industries, soon shortened to IMI, was adopted in 1962. It acquired Norgren, a pneumatics company, in 1972 and became fully independent of ICI in 1978.
The company's own history page describes goals such as agility and customer-focused solutions, and a cultural transformation that came with the 'Growth Hub' introduced in 2018. We did not find a formal values list on the pages we could read, so we have not invented one. IMI's purpose line is the clearest statement of what it wants to be known for, and it is the company's own wording.
IMI moved its headquarters from Witton to a new site near Birmingham Airport (Birmingham Business Park) in 2003, which the company says reinforces its UK roots. Heatmiser was originally based in Blackburn, Lancashire, but we could not confirm whether it still operates there. The group has about 10,000 employees worldwide (Wikipedia, 2026), most of them outside the UK, so the Birmingham head office is the main UK anchor in the pages we read. Other UK sites were not named in any source we could open.
Companies like IMI employ design and application engineers who work out how a valve or actuator should behave in a particular plant, as well as software and controls engineers, manufacturing and quality teams, product managers, and people in finance, procurement and sales. If you like physics, maths, design and technology or computing, valves and control systems are a good example of those subjects being used to save energy and make things safer. The company's own website shows current openings and where they are.
Website: www.imiplc.com
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