A focus on growth, rather than reducing cross-company costs, will be Abbey Logistics’ priority after its acquisition of Armet Logistics.

Abbey chief executive Steve Granite, who led an MBO of the company last August, told Motortransport.co.uk that both operations are running on a business as usual footing for the time being.

However, when it comes to integrating the operations it wouldn’t necessarily mean drastic cuts to resources.

He said: “There’s a lot of synergies from a staff point of view, and we think it will create capacity.

“We might have two people in the same role, and we will have our eye on reducing costs, but we’ll more have our eye on that it gives us capacity to grow further without further investment in people.”

Granite (picturerd right) told Motortransport.co.uk that once the two companies have merged and Armet has been brought under the Abbey Logistics umbrella, Abbey will move its HQ to Armet’s Liverpool site.

Steve Granite1

“Long-term, the plan is to develop the Armet site into a modern flagship tanker depot, and combine those two depots into one. We’ve got big plans for that.

“Armet has a really state of the art tank washing station. Our plan is to expand that so we can put more capacity in there and build a first class VMU to maintain the fleet, and build a nice new head office for the staff.”

He added that its decision to buy a liquid tanker company was a return to Abbey’s roots.

“Our original business was the bulk liquid marketplace in the UK, so we’re just investing back in our core business,” Granite said.

While Abbey visited a number of Armet’s customers and was met with “very positive feedback”, the next few months will see Armet running its operation as usual, with some support from its new owner, according to Granite.

“We’ll support them on essential things like quality and health and safety, so we’ll provide that wrap-around support, but in terms of the operation it’s just business as usual,” he said.

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