Office furniture company aims for £30m of sales

Sep 9 2009 by Chris Knox, The Journal

A NORTH East office furniture manufacturer believes it can add £3m to its year-on-year sales as a result of its work in the public sector, which includes providing furniture to the MoD in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite completing a £20m contract to supply furniture to the Department for Transport and the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister, Newcastle-based Godfrey Syrett believes it can grow its sales from £27m to £30m as a result of its ongoing work with the MoD and the Government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative.

The firm, which employs over 240 staff and recently created around 24 jobs, has been providing its furniture to barracks around the world for over a year and has already completed £5m worth of work as a result.

It has seen a big increase in the amount of public sector work it has attracted since the onset of the recession, with Government contracts now representing 70% of its operations.

These include a rolling contract to provide furniture for a number of new academies as part of the Government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which has seen the firm work on a range of projects worth between £200,000 and £800,000.

These include supplying furniture for the £30m Bede Academy in Blyth and the £23.8m Durham Johnston School in Durham City.

Sales director Martin Horne said: “We were pleased to land work with the Department for Transport in 2005, and have since gone on to secure a number of lucrative contracts in the public sector since then.

“We are also working for the NHS and believe these contracts will help us to continue our growth despite the tough climate.”

Last year saw the company, which started out in 1947 as a supplier to the then newly created NHS, purchase an 80,000 sq ft building next to its head offices in Killingworth, which it hopes to use to expand its production space, with most of the work carried out at its 120,000sq ft factory in Langley Moor, County Durham.

“Despite many of our clients having been impacted by the recession, we have been able to continue our growth through the public sector and expect this to continue over the coming years,” Mr Horne said.

“However, contracts such as the one with the MoD still involve bidding for various schemes, so the extent of our growth still depends on this process.”