Darchem Engineering wins top company title

May 2 2008 by Iain Laing, The Journal

DARCHEM Engineering was last night named the Company of the Year at the biggest and best business awards in the North East.

The company capped an already successful year by taking the top prize at the North East Business Awards 2007, which are organised by The Journal and its Teesside sister paper the Evening Gazette.

Jon Gagg managing director of Darchem said: “This is validation of all the effort everybody has put in over the last 10 years in taking the business from a small, specialist engineering business to a truly meaningful aerospace company.”

Almost 800 members of the region’s business community gathered at Sedgefield’s Hardwick Hall to cheer on the success of the company and the 11 other prize winners.

The award tops a record year for Darchem, which is based at Stillington, near Durham Tees Valley Airport. It has landed contracts worth £100m and was named Company of the Year for Durham and Wearside at the third regional heat of the awards.

Darchem has been established in the region for 50 years and is a world leader in the manufacture of insulation systems for use in the aerospace, energy and marine markets.

This year has seen the company unveil plans to create 40 more jobs with three factory expansions.

Darchem, which employs 630 workers at Stillington and 100 at its other site in Gloucester, supplies a raft of blue chip companies including Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Pratt & Whitney, Volvo and the Ministry of Defence.

Darchem won through against tough competition from CJ Garland & Co, which was named Tees Valley Company of the Year, and from Newcastle International Airport, which took the Tyneside and Northumberland Company of the Year title.

Fast-growing Middlesbrough- based call centre firm Garlands, which already has more than 3,000 workers in eight centres on Teesside, has this year opened a contact centre in South Shields which will employ 1,000 staff and another in South Africa for 500 staff.

And Garland shows no sign of slowing down, with plans to create hundreds more jobs in the next couple of years.

Newcastle International Airport has in the last year seen passenger numbers rise to a record 5.7 million in a volatile travel market, and unveiled its spectacular new control tower as part of ambitious new expansion plans.

The awards formed the climax of a black-tie dinner, which saw the cream of the North-East business community addressed by guest speaker the Rt Hon Nick Brown, the Minister for the North East.

ncjMedia and Gazette Media Company regional managing director Steve Brown paid tribute to the entrants, judges and sponsors of the annual event.

And he said that the awards recognised the quality and strength of business in a region which had been dealt a bitter blow with the problems surrounding Northern Rock.

“The North East remains a robust, vibrant and progressive regional economy and now, more than ever, we should shout about this from the rooftops,” he said.

“This is where the North East Business Awards can play a part. It is a celebration of success.

“It highlights great work and great companies and it makes people feel good about what’s happening.”

All of last night’s finalists had already won the individual sector awards in the sub-regional stages of the competition in Tees Valley, Durham and Wearside, Tyneside and Northumberland.

PAGE TWO: The full list of winners.