Renishaw plc

Renishaw is a metrology company first and an additive manufacturing company second, and getting that order right matters. David McMurtry and John Deer founded it in 1973 after McMurtry, then at Rolls-Royce, invented the touch-trigger probe to measure fuel pipes on Olympus engine prototypes. That probe made coordinate measuring machines practical, and probing and process control still generate the bulk of the roughly 713 million pounds of revenue the group reported for the year to June 2025. Renishaw is listed on the London Stock Exchange as RSW, sits in the FTSE 250, and employs a little over 5,300 people across 36 countries, with its main plants clustered around Wotton-under-Edge, Stonehouse and Woodchester in Gloucestershire plus sites in Ireland and India.

The precision measurement business covers CMM probes, heads, controllers and software, including the REVO five-axis measurement system, the PH20 head, the SPRINT scanning technology, the UCC controller family and MODUS metrology software. Alongside it sits shop-floor process control: machine tool probes that let a CNC machine inspect and correct itself mid-cycle, the Equator comparative gauging system for in-line checks against a master part, precision styli, and modular fixturing. Machine calibration is a separate line built around the XL-80 laser interferometer, the XM-60 multi-axis calibrator and the QC20 ballbar, all used to verify and correct machine tool and CMM geometry. Renishaw has extended the same discipline into industrial robot calibration.

Position and motion control is the second large business. Renishaw designs and manufactures open and enclosed optical encoders, magnetic encoders, inductive encoders and interferometric laser encoders, including the RESOLUTE absolute optical series and the FORTiS enclosed range. These go into machine tools, semiconductor equipment, scientific instruments and motion systems where sub-micron feedback is required.

Metal additive manufacturing is a smaller but strategically important unit. The RenAM 500 series is a laser powder bed fusion platform configurable with one, two or four 500 watt lasers as the 500S, 500D and 500Q, with automatic or Flex powder handling. The RenAM 500 Ultra adds TEMPUS technology, which fires the lasers during recoater motion and can cut build time by up to half, plus advanced process monitoring. Renishaw runs an open parameter philosophy, so customers and research partners can develop their own materials rather than being locked to a vendor set. Applications span aerospace, tooling, automotive and dental.

The remaining businesses are spectroscopy and healthcare. The inVia Raman microscope family serves materials characterisation in research and industry. On the medical side Renishaw supplies neurosurgical products including the neuromate stereotactic robot and associated planning and drug delivery equipment.

For defense buyers the connection is mostly upstream. Renishaw metrology, calibration and encoder products are embedded in the machine tools and inspection cells that produce aero engine, airframe and precision mechanism parts, and its additive systems are used by aerospace suppliers and research organisations. The company does not build weapons or platforms, and its own reporting treats aerospace as one of several industrial end markets rather than a dedicated defense segment.