FUTURE PROOF:Looking to new markets abroad and staying lean at home has enabled Wexford company Kent Stainless to bounce back from the lows of the downturn

IF WEXFORD company Kent Stainless was to do a version of a well-known Beatles song, it might go something like “I get by with a little help from my recently relocated Irish friends”.

The company, founded in 1982, has gone from focusing on offering a substitution to imported Danish stainless steel drainage products to becoming an exporter in its own right. It now offers everything from street furniture for London’s Wembley Stadium to its recently won deal to supply Chinese company Sinohydro – at € 5.5 million, its largest ever single contract. And its latest success is in no small part due to building on relationships first developed at home.

As Shane Curtin, sales and marketing director with Kent, tells it, the company first started looking abroad when Irish consulting engineers, with whom Kent had worked on supplying the burgeoning Cork pharmaceutical sector in the 1990s, started following these companies to places such as Singapore, Nairobi and China. When the engineers moved, they brought their stainless steel suppliers with them.

This has helped protect Kent from the worst of the downturn, although, like most companies in Ireland, it has not been completely immune. In 2008, revenues fell by 25 per cent to €6 million. The scale and speed of the drop-off was a tough blow.

“We knew there was a recession, and we thought we’d be down maybe 10 per cent or so,” Curtin recalls. However, major clients in the pharma sector cancelled or postponed investment. “They used to give us €3 million in turnover a year or so, but it went right down to

€1 million – it fell off a cliff,” he says. On top of this was a “collapse” in demand from upmarket hotels looking for drainage facilities for spas.

As a result, Kent accelerated a cost-cutting exercise put in place some two years earlier.

“We cut back in every part of the business – travel costs, company cars, expenses etc,” says Curtin. The severity of the decline also necessitated cutting the workforce to 70 employees from 80 or so.

Luckily for Kent, its focus on export markets helped it weather the storm and get back to growth.

Ten years ago, about 90 per cent of Kent’s business came from the domestic market; by 2005-2006, this had fallen to about 50-60 per cent, with exports making up the rest. Now exports account for 65-70 per cent of its revenues, which have been on an upward trajectory since 2009, and are expected to grow by about 18 per cent to €13 million this year.

The growth means Kent has managed to increase its workforce again, up to about 96.

But growth at this level also brings its own challenges. In February 2011, after a five-month bidding process, it won a €3.5 million contract to help design streetscapes for a new city being built in Qatar. Ten days after that came in, it also won an order as part of the Olympic Stadium in London, a €1 million project it had been chasing for some 18 months.

“It was one of our best customers and we really wanted to do it, but we already had to take on extra resources to deal with the Middle East business. The UK contract would have required some extra management staff, and we wouldn’t have been able to take them on.” So, Kent had to turn down the contract. “We were very worried about turning it down, but they told us later that it was the ‘best thing you could have done’. We still do business with them now.”

The Qatar contract marks a new phase in Kent’s development, and Curtin is hopeful the company can leverage the relationship to win other contracts in the region.

Curtin himself has considerable experience in selling to new markets, having previously worked on exporting into Russia for Glen Dimplex, and eastern Europe for refrigeration manufacturer Novum in the aftermath of the collapse of the iron curtain.

“It was literally a case of getting a telephone directory and ringing up the head office of a supermarket chain in Poland and finding someone who could speak English. Back then, an Irish person turning up in Poland was a rarity, and they tended to like you.”

So far, personal referrals have been “massively” important for Kent, and Curtin cites the example of a former client in a pharmaceutical plant in Waterford. When she moved over to Nairobi, Kenya, with her firm, she linked up with Kent back home in Wexford.

Looking ahead, Curtin plans to focus on running a steady ship and trying to maintain a revenue figure of €13 million for 2013.

“I would have to see some very big project come in for us to see that grow,” he says, adding that he expects business in the UK might fall back a bit after the Olympics.

And Curtin has some advice for other putative exporters – be patient. “Your first year you’re not going to get anything, nor the second year. It’s only really the third year or so that you see the results coming in,” he says.

And when looking to link up with the Irish diaspora, especially in the Middle East, a six-pack of Tayto never goes amiss.

“It’s the best €2.50 you can spend,” Curtin advises.

Now exports account for 65-70 per cent of its revenues, which have been on an upward trajectory since 2009