TITAN Europe, a manufacturer of big wheels for the construction and agricultural markets, which has its headquarters at Cookley, near Kidderminster, has bought out two companies.

The wheelmaker has ac-quired NewCo SpA and Italtractor ITM SpA, which is known as ITM Group.

Titan already has facilities in Italy, where more than 600 of the 1,300 employees are based with the rest split between Britain, France, Australia and Germany.

The firm has also started building a presence in emerging markets such as India and Turkey.

The ITM Group was established in 1969 and employs two-thirds of its 1,500 workforce in Italy. It is one of the world's leading independent producers of components for undercarriages and assemblers of complete frames for crawler and agricultural machines. There are also other bases in Germany, Spain, Brazil, China and USA.

Mike Akers, Titan Europe's chief executive said: "The combination of Titan Europe and ITM Group has created a global specialist manufacturer of both track and wheels vehicle movement systems which will provide significant benefits in serving our global international customer base as well as providing additional sales expansion opportunities."

Cecilia La Manna, finance director of Titan Europe, added: "We are delighted to have added ITM to the Titan Group. It enables us to consolidate our market position."

, improve our purchasing power whilst also gaining substantial synergistic benefits for both the operations and our customers. With Titan's strong profit and cash generation record and robust balance sheet, we believe that there will be further opportunities to build on our solid market position."

The enlarged Group will trade under the name Titan Europe Plc with immediate effect and will continue to be headed by headed by Mike Akers, who has over 35 years experience in the automotive components industry.