UK cleaning and detergent manufacturer RP Adam Ltd (Arpal Group) has unveiled ambitious plans to increase annual production by 50 per cent.
The company is planning to invest more than £2.75 million in its global operations across the UK and the Middle East in a two-year bid to reach production targets of 12 million litres of liquid and 650,000 kgs of powder product to satisfy increased customer demand.
The UK’s private health and residential care sector is a key growth area for the Arpal Group, which now serves more than 1,000 care homes across the country. Current annual sales in this sector now reach almost £2.5 million, representing 23 per cent of total UK sales, with a growth factor of more than 50 per cent in the past three years. The company is planning to double this turnover by the summer of 2018.
This next phase investment will focus on factory and warehouse expansion, filling equipment, customer support systems and extra manpower geared to expanding market share in this fast growing and demanding sector.
Arpal Group’s sales and marketing director Max Adam, the fourth-generation Adam to be involved in the family business, explains: “Our residential care sector business is booming and it is Arpal Group’s stated intention is to be the UK’s number care home cleaning products provider by 2020.
“We supply care homes with a wide variety of professional laundry and housekeeping products to ensure a comfortable and clean environment for residents and patients. Our market leading chemicals concentrates, kitchen hygiene and professional laundry ranges, together with our outstanding field service package, provides independent and multi-site operators with an unrivalled site service offering.
“This next investment phase will allow us to increase our resources, production capacities and level of service commitment in this fast-growing sector to an even higher level - backed by strong values of integrity and trust which underpin everything we do.”
Central to Arpal Group’s UK expansion strategy will be a significantly increased turnover with national distribution partners – especially in the networks covered by janitorial and catering consumables and foodservice distributors. These include specialist care sector logistics companies like Deliver Net and Countrywide Healthcare Supplies, but also include numerous longstanding regional partners who are as equally important to the company.
“We primarily access the UK end-user customer market through an extensive network of regional and national distribution partners,” Max adds.
“Around 90 per cent of end-user business currently goes through a reseller, and this is where our aspiration to reach growth targets can be really accelerated. We now want to grow our UK distributor network, especially in niche markets where our service offering and commitment to customer service provides something a little different and more personal than the multi-national supplier or the cheap and cheerful box movers.
“We want to focus on what we do best, and that is developing and manufacturing high quality cleaning solutions backed by an outstanding service to end-user business consumers on behalf of our distributor partners.”
This investment phase is final phase of Arpal Group’s five-year ‘20/20’ investment programme, launched in 2015 as the fourth-generation family-owned business approached its 125th year in business. So far, more than £1.5 million has already been injected in the global business as part of the 20/20 programme.
The company now employs more than100 people and services customers across a wide range of sectors in the UK as well as operating successful subsidiaries and distribution partnerships across the Middle East - including Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Martin Carroll, Arpal Group’s technical director, believes the next phase investment makes a significant statement of intent for the company. “These are exciting times for Arpal Group both at home and abroad,” he says.
“The UK represents the engine room of our 20/20 ambition and the next two years will focus primarily on factory expansion at our Selkirk HQ to allow more space for raw materials, packaging, and production lines to meet increased demand – including plans for a new purpose-built £500,000 on site warehousing facility. We also plan to install new filling lines for 10-litre laundry drums, specifically required for markets such as the care home sector. Our UK liquid and powder sales have increased by £850,000 over the last three years, and we are anticipating another growth spurt this year with an additional £500,000 of sales growth.
“Our increased production and turnover targets reflect our aggressive ambition to take on the large global competition as well as the smaller ‘no frills’ suppliers by providing significant commercial and customer-service benefits in demanding sectors, where service matters most.”
