Nearly 150 jobs lost in Barry as scaffolding firm goes under
Ascaffolding business which was the first Welsh company to receive funding from the Business Growth Fund has gone into administration, leading to 148 redundancies.
The firm is SHS Integrated Services, based in Barry.
Administrator Deloitte says that 11 staff have been kept on to assist with the winding-up of the business, which also provides insulation and cladding.
Poor trading over the past two years is being blamed for the firm’s failure.
The company has other facilities in Pembrokeshire and Doncaster.
SHS provided scaffolding, insulation and cladding services to a range of contractors in a variety of industries.
As well as its main bases at Barry, Doncaster and Pembrokeshire, it had sites stretching across the UK employing a total of 159 workers across four trading entities.
Deloitte said that just before the appointment of its administrators Richard Hawes and Matt Cowlishaw, 148 employees were made redundant.
It said that SHS would cease trading while talks take place with potential buyers for the contracts and assets of the group.
It added that the administration “follows a poor trading performance across the past two years, particularly outside of core scaffolding trading activities. Management has attributed this downturn to poor pricing of contracts and a lack of control over direct labour costs.”
In 2012 the Business Growth Fund (BGF) invested £5.4m in the company, then known as Swanbridge Hire and Sales (SHS), in what was the fund’s first investment in Wales.
The investment in the Barry-headquartered business was intended to support its next growth phase, which was expected to lead to a doubling of turnover over three years.
SHS was founded in 1998 by its chief executive Paul Smith. At the time of the investment by the BGF, it employed 226 people, erecting and dismantling large-scale, technically demanding scaffolding structures for clients in the petrochemical, oil and power generation sectors, and providing complementary insulation services.
Its services were often required by site owners, operators and contractors for essential maintenance and refurbishment work of industrial plants, and it enjoyed long-term contracts with multinationals such as Dow Corning, Murco and Alstom.
But its most recent set of accounts, for the year ending December 31, 2015, show a pre-tax loss of £2.3m on turnover of £16.5m.
The administration covers the group’s four trading entities – SHS Integrated Services, SHS Cladding, SHS Integrated Services (Transmission) and SHS Insulation.
The £2.5bn BGF was set up by the Government to back growth-focused SMEs with equity investments ranging from £2m to £10m, and was backed by a syndicate of banks including Barclays and Standard Chartered.
The investment in SHS was managed for BGF by its director for Wales and the south-west of England Paul Oldham and colleagues Ned Dorbin and Alex Garfitt.