LPW Technology Ltd is celebrating its debut in the Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100. The league table ranks the UK’s small and medium-sized (SME) companies with the fastest-growing international sales, and LPW has entered at No 29, making it the top-performing organisation in the North West of England.
In a rapidly developing global AM industry, LPW has been proactive in seeking out new markets. Dr Phil Carroll, LPW’s founder and CEO, comments, “We understand that to achieve the challenging growth rate we have set ourselves, we have to both innovate, and look to the global market place. We recognised early that there is a world-wide demand for the premium quality, traceable metal powders we supply. To capitalise on the opportunity to supply critical industries such as medical, aerospace and automotive, we achieved the required quality accreditations, including AS 9100 & AS 9120 for aerospace and ISO 13485 for medical.
“As we enter our tenth year, we’re continuing to scale up our operations,” Dr Carroll continues. “We are constructing a purpose-built £20 million facility in Widnes, and we expect to recruit up to 120 highly-skilled positions by mid-2019.
“Our highly-trained teams put customer service at the heart of everything we do, and we direct our research and development expertise into anticipating the needs of the metal AM industry and designing forward-looking solutions that exceed current requirements,” says Dr Carroll. “We have developed a unique AM powder lifecycle management system which strictly controls risk for manufacturers, adding confidence, reliability and traceability in metal powder production and repeated AM builds.”
In 2015, exports accounted for almost 75% of LPW’s sales. It has established a thriving US subsidiary to meet the growing demand from the North and South American AM markets, and has a German sales office and a global network of resellers in China, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Singapore and Turkey, with plans to recruit more. Key to this international growth is LPW’s comprehensive training and support program for its network.
In 2016 LPW was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade and also entered the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 for the first time. It can add this latest achievement to its recent Ruban d’Honneur for Import/Export at the European Business Awards.