A note from our owner

October 2026

I first walked into Owen Springs at fifteen, during a summer holiday, carrying springs around and testing the patience of people who knew far more than I did. This autumn, we sold it.

That decision says more about how we own businesses than anything else I could write here, so it’s where I’ll start.

OSL Group is privately owned and has no exit timetable. We are not building to sell, and we don’t run our businesses from the centre. Each is led by its own management team, close to its customers. The Group’s job is to make each business stronger than it could be on its own, through capital, shared systems and data, and people who can offer challenge and help.

That carries an obligation. We should only own a business if we are the best owner for it. If someone else can do more for it than we can, the right thing for its people, its customers and for us is to find that owner.

Owen Springs joined the Group in 2001 as part of our automotive business. When we left automotive in 2009, it was the part we kept. It had a good team and a long record of performing, and that was reason enough for many years.

But our strategy has sharpened. We back businesses in large, international markets where we can build real depth in product development, sales, marketing and customer service. CQR and Cutting Technologies have grown on that path. Owen Springs needed manufacturing scale and global reach that we couldn’t provide. In September it joined Jamna Auto, one of India’s largest spring manufacturers. It is a good outcome on both sides, and I’m grateful to everyone who was part of its story with us.

The sale also strengthens the Group’s finances and gives us capital to invest in the two businesses we are building.

CQR Security has an established leadership team that is growing in confidence and in its ability to deliver against its strategy. After two years of reorganisation, it is streamlining its operations and making inroads with its product development programme.

Cutting Technologies sells metal cutting tools worldwide under the Rotabroach and Unibor brands. Rotabroach has spent the last eighteen months streamlining its operations, and the team is now focused on winning in its markets. In the United States, Unibor is growing through its direct sales strategy.

We have three priorities for the year ahead. The first is developing our management teams. Our approach depends on empowering the people closest to customers and on collaboration across the Group, and that only works with the right skills, mindsets and culture, so we are investing in our leaders and in how they work together.

The second is building our data and systems. Our businesses share a common systems and data infrastructure, which is unusual for a group of our size, and we are continuing to build it so that an improvement in one business can be adopted by the other quickly and simply.

The third is putting AI to work. We are integrating AI into those systems so that our people spend less time on routine work and more on what genuinely adds value for customers.

I’ll report on each of these in next year’s note.

We expect to grow, in part through acquisition. If you own a business and are thinking about its future, and you’d value an owner who leaves management to manage and thinks in decades rather than deals, I’d be glad to talk.