Eight high flyers on Tech Track 100
ENTERTAINMENT Magpie is the highest placed of eight North West companies included in the annual Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100.
The league table ranks Britain’s one hundred privately-owned technology, media and telecoms businesses with the fastest-growing sales over the last three years.
The North West has two more Tech Track 100 members than last year – making it the best-represented on the league table outside London and the Southeast.
Together the eight companies employ 1,400 people and have achieved combined sales of £517m.
Online music CD and games trader Entertainment Magpie, which trades as musicMagpie.co.uk, based in Macclesfield, is the region’s highest ranked company and appears on the league table for the first time and has taken a top three position.
Sales rocketed 205% a year to £30.8m in 2011, just three years after the company was founded by Steve Oliver and Walter Gleeson.
This year musicMagpie raised £10m from private equity firm LDC, and former Asda boss Allan Leighton joined as chairman.
Cheshire-based The Hut Group makes it onto the league table for the fifth consecutive year and maintains its top 10 position with annual sales growth over three years of 141.6%. The group is reportedly now mulling a Stock Market flotation.
Its backers include Sir Stuart Rose, former chairman of Marks & Spencer,ex-Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy and former Matalan chief executive Angus Monro, as well as the investment firms Balderton and Artemis.
It has made four acquisitions in the past year, including Manchester-based Myprotein in June.
Rochdale’s We Buy Any Car – a business owned by the founders of Carcraft, the McKee family – is a new entrant and is ranked 25th.
Three companies headquartered in Manchester feature – web hosting and marketing company UKFast (76th place), Scott Fletcher’s ANS Group (81st) and family owned Party Delights, an online party goods retailer, which sells more than 13,000 products both for chidren’s celebrations and grown-up gatherings.
Party Delights also runs white-label versions of its websites for Tesco Direct and Toys R Us. Sales grew 38% a year, from £3.6m in 2008 to £9.5m in 2011, earning it 93rd place.
The other Tech Track 100 members are Bolton-based Parcel2go.com, a new entrant at 89th and Chorley’s Elite Telecom, which is ranked 100th.
This year’s Tech Track 100 companies achieved, on average, sales growth of 74% a year over the last three years of accounts, from a combined total of £680m in 2007/08 to £3.1bn in 2010/11.
The full findings are published in a special eight-page supplement within the business section of The Sunday Times this weekend.
