The annual Commercial Vehicle Show was held over three days in March at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. This event is one of the biggest in Europe and attracts many thousands of visitors from the transport industry and all its related suppliers and customers. This year we were honoured to receive a request from our trailer suppliers, Dennison to display one of our newly acquired sliding skeletals (that's a trailer which adjusts to take different sizes of containers) on their stand. Dennison are a family run company who have an excellent reputation for customer service and production of a top quality, continuously refined product. Their highly innovative skeletal trailer is currently UK market leader, no mean feat in today's highly competitive environment.

Government Transport Secretary, Alister Darling was one of the high profile visitors to the show and impressed a number of industry supremeos with his in depth knowledge of Telematics. He had done his homework a couple of weeks earlier in Edinburgh, when we supplied one of our new trucks, driven by John Stevenson, for a comprehensive demonstration of this latest vehicle information technology system. Over the years John Mitchell vehicles and trailers have appeared at a number of prestigious shows and displays, a small photographic record of these is pictured left.

Spring Into Summer

Here we are starting another financial year, what a challenge the last one was! A shortage of drivers combined with rising fuel costs and escalating insurance premiums. Bad news? Never!

The team at John Mitchell have worked hard to keep the business in the black. Last years profit levels were acceptable but not spectacular, but we met our targets and kept our fleet replacement and depot improvement programmes on schedule. With the support of our valued customers we hope to progress and develop the company similarly, this year.

I hope you all have a good summer, perhaps jetting off to some warm far off land, or enjoying some well-deserved time off, closer to home. I will hopefully talk to you before the next newsletter, but if not enjoy your break!

Iain Mitchell.