Johnson succeeds Clee at Baldor and predicts brighter future

Gavin Johnson has succeeded Miles Clee as general manager of Baldor UK, following Clee`s decision to leave the motion industry. Johnson, a mechanical engineer, joined Baldor in 1998 as a sales engineer. He has recently been sales director of its linear motion division in California.

Johnson (above) is optimistic about the future for the motion controls business, and expects to see a return to strong growth in the in the coming year, driven largely by the arrival of lower-cost, high-performance linear motors. "The motion control sector has been bumping along for a while now," he says, "but we`re starting to see a lot of development effort, led by sectors such as semiconductor equipment.

"Baldor`s current experience is characterised by engineering-intensive involvement in projects," he adds. "As the market starts to pick up, we expect to see it led by equipment launches emphasizing state-of-the-art motion technology, soft- and network-intensive architectures, for example, and linear motion."

Johnson, whose career has included stints at GEC, Linear Drives and Eurotherm Drives, will oversee the development, manufacturing and sales of Baldor`s motion control and servo drive products, from the company`s Bristol base.

The departing general manager, Miles Clee, joined Baldor when it bought his former company, Optimised Control, in 1997. Clee was a director at Optimised, which had developed the Mint motion language and NextMove motion controllers.