Billions of Coke cans help pour profit

MORE than 280billion aluminium cans are made every year for drinks from Coca-Cola to beer and iced tea. The metal is heated to an extremely high temperature and filtered to ensure the resultant cans are clean and toxic-free. About half those cans are made using filters from Porvair, a small engineering business headquartered in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Porvair designs and manufactures filters for a range of end uses, including laboratory analysis, aerospace and heavy industry, as well as molten metal production.

The group’s filters can be found on almost every commercial plane, cleaning and purifying fuel and oil so that engines run efficiently and hydraulic systems operate smoothly. Porvair filters are also used in environmental laboratories, analysing water samples and industrial gases to ensure they meet regulatory standards and are safe to use.

On the metals front, Porvair filters are used in a host of fields, from car production to engine turbines to metal alloys, as well as those billions of drinks cans.

Like SigmaRoc, the company believes in giving each division a degree of autonomy so managers feel empowered and staff loyalty is high. The firm has thousands of customers so no single business accounts for more than 5 per cent of annual sales. And chief executive Ben Stocks focuses on markets with above-average growth prospects, such as aluminium, which is increasingly in vogue, as it is relatively light and easily recycled.

The choice of markets and customers has been designed to make Porvair more resilient than many manufacturing firms and it seems to work. Profits have grown by an average of more than 12 per cent annually for the past 15 years and last month, Stocks said earnings for the 12 months to November 30 would be ahead of market expectations, as strong growth in aerospace, petrochemicals and water offset a more sluggish performance elsewhere. Full results will be announced in February but brokers are looking for sales of around £176million, profits of £21million and a 12 per cent increase in the dividend to 6.4p. Prospects are bright for 2024 and beyond. Filtration is an integral part of almost every 21st Century industry. Porvair devotes time and money to research and development, and relationships with customers tend to be longstanding.

Stocks knows every inch of the business too, having been at the helm for the past 26 years and having turned Porvair into a filtration specialist whose products are valued across the globe.