UK’s Victoria Carpets Upbeat
Kidderminster, England, July 25, 2007--As a survivor of the slump in Kidderminster’s traditional carpet industry, 110-year-old Victoria Carpets has had to learn to be faster, smarter and more flexible, according to the Globe and Star.
The newspaper reported that lessons of UK manufacturing over recent decades have been thrown into sharp focus by the fate of many companies in the UK’s traditional home of the carpet trade.
Heavy investment in new technology, a smaller, more flexible workforce, now numbering just under 300, and greater emphasis on marketing have all helped Victoria come through a severe slump in trade over the past decade – partly caused by the fad for pulling up carpets and laying down laminate wooden flooring.
“We identified our niche and stuck to our strategy,” said managing director Alan Bullock.
He has worked at Victoria since 1972 and has seen both bad times and good. Fortunately it has been more a case of the latter in recent times. Last month Victoria unveiled annual figures showing its profits had soared by 37 per cent, to £2.76 million in the 12 months to March compared to £2.01 million last year.
At the same time sales were up six per cent to £55.4 million despite a five per cent fall in the carpet market.
Analysts hailed Victoria for controlling costs and boosting sales, seeing it as building on its 12 per cent share of the middle and top end of the carpet market.
Major investment in the past two decades saw Victoria Carpets buy Westwood Yarns, in West Yorkshire, in 1989, giving it control of its own supply of raw materials. The move was subsequently mirrored in its Australian operation.
Most recently Victoria bought two of the biggest brands in Ireland, Munster and Navan, giving it a major slice of the Irish contract and retail market.
It has also expanded to buy a Canadian business supplying through architects and developers.
But, most recently, Mr Bullock was faced with the unhappy job of laying off 18 people when the firm closed its dye house last year and, in 2005, 85 lost their jobs when the firm took the decision to close its division making heavily patterned Axminster carpets.
After 50 years the drop in demand for Axminster had turned it into a loss-maker that was unable to compete with cheap competition from the East.
So now the bulk of Victoria’s production is turned over to making tufted carpets, using some of the most modern equipment on the market.
The firm continues to invest heavily in the latest equipment, giving it a substantial technological advantage on potential cheap competition from the Far East.
It is currently about to install a state-of-the-art £250,000 tufting machine that will speed up production even further.
Kidderminster-based carpet manufacturer Victoria has issued a bullish trading statement in the face of rising interest rates.
