Arnab Basu, CEO, Kromek
Jan 19 2010 by Jez Davison, Evening Gazette
An academic-turned-entrepreneur with three degrees under his belt is making a ‘triple A’ impact on Tees Valley’s high-tech industrial sector. Jez Davison meets Arnab Basu.
For that reason, Arnab sees no reason to shift the company’s HQ away from Tees Valley - the world will come to him.
“We will have a presence in America, Europe and in Sedgefield. Our base is NETPark but our outlook is global.”
Arnab’s ambition became apparent more than a decade earlier, when he decided to cut loose from his father Akrun’s metal processing business in Calcutta.
“Family businesses are always trying,” he confesses. “You have to manage relationships on different fronts.”
With a natural sciences degree from Calcutta University under his belt, he came to England in 1996 to broaden his academic horizons and completed an engineering degree at Northumbria University.
After graduating he joined global technology giant Invensys, managing the company’s operations in China before returning to Northumbria University in 2000 to embark on a PhD in physics.
He then spent a few months globe-trotting around India with his wife Beatrijs before returning to England to seek what he thought would be his ideal job in London’s financial hub.
An eleventh-hour change of heart led him back to the North-east to help university spin-out Durham Scientific Crystals (DSC) find commercial markets for its X-ray detection and imaging equipment.
Boosted by Arnab’s academic and commercial nous, DSC (now Kromek) expanded from a fledgling two-man operation to employ more than 40 staff with an estimated market value of more than £50m.
Although the company has benefited from more than £1m of public funding, he’d like to see Government release the purse strings to help other hi-tech start-ups catapult their ideas into the commercial arena.
And with those 58 patents already in the company vault he’ll no doubt be pleased at the recently announced 10% corporation tax rate for income from UK patents, although this won’t come on stream until 2013.
By then, those investment bankers might well be coming to him.
