Clyde Space expands
and announces £2m orders
Clyde Space is expanding and moving to larger
premises to meet increased demand for its products.
The company announced the move as it
revealed record turnover for the last financial year and
confirmed two major new orders.
Clyde Space founder and chief
executive officer Craig Clark said: “We’ve had our best year
to date and we expect next year’s results to show a further
step change in revenue and profit.
“Our growth
is due to the investment we made in product development over
the last few years starting to pay off as our market
continues to expand. Our market has grown
at an average of 40% per year for the last five years and
this is set to continue.”
The move to the top-floor of the
Skypark building in Glasgow, Scotland, will take place on
November 28 and triple the floor space available to the
company at its current headquarters in the West of Scotland
Science Park to 10,000 square feet.
Clean Room capacity – the controlled
environment where Clyde Space’s hi-tech products are
manufactured – and laboratory space will increase threefold
and a ground station is being installed to track satellites
on behalf of customers.
The new headquarters will also allow
the company to increase the number of staff from its current
level of 40.
Craig said:
“We’re growing pretty fast just now and have literally run
out of space for new recruits, so our move to our new
premises can’t come soon enough. Our
office move is not only desk space, we are significantly
expanding our manufacturing facility to give us more room
for assembly and test as we prepare ourselves for greater
volumes of product sales.”
Craig also revealed turnover for the
last financial year had increased by 100% to £2million,
profits were “significantly up” and he was confident of
further growth with two new contracts worth more than £2m
already under way.
The first, worth €1.4million (£1.2m),
is to provide power systems for Europe’s third largest
European space company, Luxembourg-based Lux Space. These
will be used in two satellites Lux is building for the
European Space Agency.
The second,
worth $1.5m (£0.94m), is for US-based Spire Inc.
Clyde Space’s success has led to it becoming Spire’s
biggest sub-contractor.
Clyde
Space, a leading producer of small satellite, nanosatellite
and CubeSat systems, is also currently producing the most
advanced CubeSat ever built for the Belgian Institute for
Space Aeronomy (BIRA-ISAB) for its Picasso project.
The Institute specialises in the physics and chemistry
of the atmosphere of the earth and other planets and outer
space.
UKube-1,
Scotland’s first satellite, was designed and built by Clyde
Space in Glasgow and was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome,
Kazakhstan, in July. Craig said its payload commissioning
was almost complete and the satellite was performing well.
He said:
“Our first satellite, UKube-1, allowed us not only to
prove a bunch of new technologies in space, it also puts us
on the map as a proven spacecraft provider not just in the
UK, but globally.
“We’re
building on this experience and success to deliver even more
capable spacecraft. I’m also really
pleased to be winning more business from the European Space
Agency (ESA) as this indicates that we have matured into an
established European spacecraft manufacturer and we are
aiming to increase our activities with ESA over the coming
years.”
Clyde Space is backed by private equity company
Coralinn LLP, the investment vehicle of leading Scottish
entrepreneur Hugh Stewart OBE, and Nevis Capital.
Craig also announced that the Clyde Space board had
been strengthened by the addition of Coralinn’s Investment
Director John Wardlaw.
