THE NAME Lansing Linde will go from Basingstoke on Monday - but the Kingsclere Road plant will still be the UK headquarters of the forklift truck manu-facturer.

At the end of last week, the company celebrated its rebrand-ing as Linde with a VIP tour of its manufacturing facility and a dinner at Tylney Hall in Rotherwick.

The rebranding also brought Bruno Kulich, joint managing director of Linde Material Handling in Germany, back to Basingstoke. He was joint managing director in the town before returning to Germany.

He said: "When I came to Basingstoke after the merger with Linde in 1989, it was my intention - as evidenced by the Linde Lansing logo - that this would lead to us becoming fully-fledged members of the Linde family.

"From the beginning of this year we already started to put the Linde logo on all trucks. Now we have decided to complete the process and change the company and brand to Linde as well."

Mr Kulich added: "Now we aim to exploit our international expertise and experience to enhance the businesses of all our UK customers and partners as well as opening up new opportunities for our employees."

He also had special praise for the workers, of which around 800 work in Basingstoke, saying: "In the UK we have an enthusiastic and skilled team of more than 2,500 people.

"Their commitment and dedication has enabled us to create more material handling solutions in more business sectors than anyone else, and achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction in the industry."

He added: "Linde combines strong scientific and technical know-how with a highly-innovative approach to ground-breaking engineering achievements.

"We believe the time is right for us to capitalise on this by having one common name - a name that represents innovation, product quality and progress."

The new slogan for Linde is "Into the Blue", which is designed to signify the opportunities that exist for stakeholders to shape the future of the company as the leading material handling supplier in the UK.

The Linde Group was founded by Karl von Linde in 1879 and came into the material handling market through manufacturing forklift trucks in 1960.

It has invested more than £50m in developing a state-of-the-art production plant in Basingstoke. Next year there will be an effort to place more investment in new tooling and machinery as well as the IT technology sector.