Ifor Williams Trailers

Ifor Williams Trailers was founded in 1958 by the local farmer Ifor Williams at Cynwyd, near Corwen in Denbighshire, and the original Cynwyd factory is still in production. The company, incorporated as Ifor Williams Trailers Limited on 3 April 1975, grew into Britain's largest manufacturer of trailers up to 3,500 kg gross weight, with a standard range of well over a thousand variants across livestock, horsebox, general-duty, tipper, plant, flatbed, box-van and car-transporter trailers, horsebox containers and pick-up canopies, and had built more than half a million trailers when its own company information was written; the 750,000th rolled off the line in 2018, the firm's sixtieth year.

The farm trailer is the core of the business, and the livestock trailer is what puts an Ifor Williams behind a Land Rover. The TA510 range offers the largest volume and gross weight the company makes: body lengths of 10, 12, 14 and now 16 feet with 4, 6 or 7 ft headroom, a 3,500 kg gross weight and payloads of 1,950 to 2,550 kg, on a twin-axle beam (tri-axle optional on the 12 and 14 ft and standard on the 16 ft) with leaf-sprung suspension, a galvanised steel chassis, aluminium side panels, a heat-reflecting roof and a grip-faced aluminium-planked rear ramp; the 7 ft version takes a centre partition for two horses, and the factory-fitted EasyLoad folding-deck system, unique to the company, was improved in 2024. A high proportion of parts, including axles, chassis and most body parts, are made to the company's own designs, with an on-site galvanising plant and CNC laser, plasma, punch and press equipment.

Trailers are built at four main sites in North Wales: Cynwyd, Clawdd Poncen at Corwen, Ruthin and Deeside, where a £5 million facility opened at Sandycroft in 2017 and a further site on Boundary Park in the Deeside Industrial Park in 2021; the Deeside plant was severely damaged by fire on 28 August 2012 and machinery at Clawdd Poncen by a second fire on 14 September 2017. The company employed about 800 people across six sites before 63 redundancies in late 2008, and lists 545 in 2024. It sells through more than fifty UK distributors and subsidiaries and distributors across Europe, Australia and New Zealand and beyond, exports accounting for around a quarter to a third of sales, and since June 2016 has sponsored Wrexham AFC, moving from shirt to shorts in 2021 when TikTok took the shirt. It is a member of the National Trailer and Towing Association and the SMMT's light-trailer section, and is run by John Williams as director and chief executive with Carole Williams as director.