flexlife Sprints into Number One Spot

07 September 2010

Flexible pipe specialist flexlife has taken the number one spot in this year’s Scottish Business Insiders Sprint 100 list.

The listing, which features the 100 fastest growing Scottish companies with a turnover between £250,000 and £5m, recognises flexlife’s impressive results over the past three years.

Founded by Stuart Mitchell, John Marsden and Carl Petter Halvorsen just three years ago with a bank loan of £20,000, the company has seen turnover grow by an extraordinary 860 per cent.

flexlife boosted turnover to £3.01million in year two with net profit of £680,000 and made a profit of £1.58m on turnover of £4.8m in the year to March 2010. Looking to the future, a target of around £7.2m turnover has been set for 2010/11 and the company aims to grow to sales of £20m by 2013/14.

Stuart Mitchell, director of integrity at flexlife, said: “Being named as Scotland’s fastest growing small company is fantastic news. This is a very exciting time for us as we are building our international presence and about to launch new products. Having a robust business strategy is vital to any growing business and has been central to our success.’’

flexlife made its mark by developing a new kind of ultrasonic technology which allowed for the succesful scanning of the annulus of flexible risers and flowlines in situ with 100 per cent accuracy.

Mr Mitchell said: “The system we have developed is a complete step change from inspecting, finding a problem and taking six months to two years to replace the pipe to us inspecting, categorising the problem and working to extend the life and repair it. A flexible riser in the North Sea costs around £6m to £9m to replace so it’s a huge saving if you can keep the riser operating throughout the field life."

A new permanent monitoring system, which is a spin off of the ultrasonic scanning system, is coming to the market within the next few months. flexlife has also recently finished trials on a new patent for a flexible pipe repair system.

flexlife has successfully completed subsea projects with clients including Total, Apache North Sea, Chevron, Subsea 7, Hess, Statoil, CNR and Maersk UK in the last three years.