Global growth drives record financial results for Yorkshire textile manufacturer
TEXTILE manufacturer the Camira Group has announced a record financial performance on the back of sales to 69 countries worldwide.
The group, which was founded in Huddersfield in 1974 as Camborne Fabrics and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, saw its annual sales reach £60.1m in the year to the end of December 2013, up 9.3% from the previous period.
The company sold 7.5m metres of contract interior fabrics – for areas such as corporate offices, universities, auditoria, and mass passenger transport for bus, coach and rail – and ended the year with operating profit of £5.3m.
Camira Group, with has its headquarters in Mirfield and has 500,000sq ft of manufacturing space across sites in Huddersfield, Nottingham and in Lithuania, now sells more fabrics overseas than into the UK market, with exports accounting for 60% of the group’s total turnover.
The company’s largest market is mainland Europe, which is run from its European sales office near Stuttgart, Germany, contributing more than £24m annual turnover from sales in all 28 member countries of the European Union, as well as in expanding new markets such as Turkey.
Turnover in North America was up 12% to £5.6m, while Asia Pacific was lifted 25% to £1.5m as the company saw the results of its investment in a new showroom and sales staff in Shanghai, as well as a new distributor agreement covering Australia and New Zealand. The North American market is poised for further growth following the recent move of its US distribution centre from Indianapolis to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the opening of its first US showroom in Chicago, targeting the interior architecture and design sector. The company has also launched its first collection of healthcare fabrics targeting an expanding new global market sector.
A current holder of the Queen’s Award for Sustainable Development, Camira Group considers itself to be at the forefront of environmental innovation. In 2013 the company sold more than 2m metres of recycled fabrics, introduced its first closed loop fabrics made from its own recycled waste yarn, and expanded its collection of wool-bast fibre fabrics made from harvested crops such as nettles and hemp. Contract wins included a new environmental wool-flax fabric for Marks & Spencer’s Plan A sofa, while the company’s latest innovation is a fabric made from recycled coffee sacks blended with wool.
Camira Group’s manufacturing capability was further strengthened as it completed the acquisition of its Huddersfield based wool yarn spinner Stork Brothers. This comes on the back of the establishment in 2012 of a joint venture yarn dyeing facility – the first in the UK in a generation – taking the company’s in-house control from wool yarn spinning and dyeing, through to weaving, textile finishing, and technical knitting.
Camira Group chairman and chief executive Steve Bullas said: “Every one of our 600 strong workforce has worked extremely hard to contribute to our continued growth and profitability. We have remained profitable throughout the recession and saw a very strong final quarter of 2013 which has continued into the first half of 2014.
“We’re continuing to advance our industry leading sustainability platform and have invested heavily in additional sales and marketing resource in key markets in USA and China, as well as in Germany and Poland, and closer to home in the London design sector. We are now getting ready for another intense period of marketing activity, with trade exhibitions taking place from September in Berlin, Houston, Cologne and Birmingham, and a raft of exciting new product launches coming to market.”
