Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade

In a four year period, the company has increased turnover by  380%, from £43m, to £207m, with exports accounting for over 98% of sales.

The company’s growth has been achieved by adopting a  philosophy of heavily investing in research and development in order to  anticipate customer requirements and respond quickly to them. Maintaining its  position as a market leader in the defence sector, Pearson Engineering’s design  engineering develop innovative products that are immediately available off the  shelf to meet the challenges its customers face and which can be quickly  tailored to specific host vehicle and operational requirements.

The sale of one of the company’s core products, the Self  Protection Adaptive Roller Kit (SPARK) to the US Army is an example of how this  approach pays dividends.

When the US army was looking for a system to help tackle the  emerging Improvised Explosive Device (IED) threat to soldiers and vehicles,  responsible for almost 40% of US casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom, they  were able to turn to Pearson Engineering’s SPARK, a product already developed  in anticipation of such a problem. Subsequently, the company won a number of  contracts and the product features heavily amongst the world’s armed forces  operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of this pioneering approach, Pearson Engineering  was a winner of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation in 2012.

Chairman of Pearson Engineering,  John Reece said,

“We are obviously very pleased to  win the Queen’s Award for the second successive year, this time for enterprise  in international trade. This recognises many years of export efforts by  Pearson Engineering; indeed many of our products are class leaders and in  use globally.
The mine plough and roller  products are the fruits of decades of R & D and, indeed, the mine plough  has been under development for nearly 50 years, linking back to our history of  designing agricultural ploughs and the development of subsea ploughing for  burying pipelines and cables.

We are aiming to continue our worldwide  niche business with an ever broadening range of innovative engineering products.  We are now investing in the development of new mine clearance systems as well  as a range of mobile bridge laying equipment that is faster to deploy, more  flexible and more reliable than that currently in the market place.

I would like to thank all our  employees for helping us achieve this Queen’s Award, without top quality people  we wouldn’t be where we are today.”