Wonderful success story of a Greenfaulds High alumnus, who also happens to be a really good guy. SATELLITE pioneer Clyde Space is targeting further rapid growth with a move to a new home at Glasgows Skypark which is three times the size of its existing premises, as it celebrates yet more prestigious orders. Clyde Space, which designed and manufactured Scotlands first satellite, has also revealed that it achieved record annual revenues from projects of £2 million in the year to April 30. This was nearly double the corresponding revenue figure of £1.1 million for the prior 12 months. The companys founder and chief executive officer, Craig Clark, declared that profits in the year to April had been significantly up on the prior 12 months with the pre-tax figure coming in at about £120,000. He expects the current financial year to April 2015 to show a further step-change in revenue and profit. Mr Clark observed it was becoming easier, on the back of Clyde Spaces success, to recruit the top talent from Scotlands universities. Clyde Space, a leading producer of small satellite, nanosatellite and CubeSat systems, plans to move to the top floor of the Skypark building at Finnieston on November 28. This will give it 10,000 square feet of space, about three times the area of its current headquarters in Glasgows West of Scotland Science Park. Mr Clark said the new premises would enable Clyde Space to install its own ground station for the first time. This will allow the company to track satellites on behalf of customers, widening the range of contracts it can fulfil. He noted the new clean room, the controlled environment in which the companys cutting-edge products are manufactured, would alone be about the size of its entire premises at West of Scotland Science Park. Mr Clark, who is Clyde Spaces largest single shareholder, estimated laboratory space at the Skypark premises would be about 2,000 sq ft. The rest of the new headquarters will be office space. He flagged two further prestigious contracts won by Clyde Space, worth more than £2m in total. The first, worth about €1.4m (£1.2m), is for the provision of power systems for Europes third-largest space company, Luxembourg-based Lux Space. These systems will be used in two, 50-kilogramme satellites which Lux is building for the European Space Agency. The second contract, worth about $1.5m (£940,000), is to produce CubeSat power systems with solar panels for US-based Spire Inc. Mr Clark noted Spire was one of the major satellite services companies which had sprung up in Silicon Valley in California, and highlighted hopes of carrying out further contracts for the US company. Clyde Space employs 40 people. Mr Clark, who said the company was focused on hiring people with masters or PhD qualifications, estimated the workforce would be more than 50 by this time next year. Noting recruitment had been more difficult in Clyde Spaces early years, he said: We now find we are at the stage and size and [have the] stability as a company where we are actually attracting the top students in the engineering courses in Scotland, the prizewinners, the top of the year. Clyde Space, founded in 2005, is backed by private equity company Coralinn LLP, the investment vehicle of Scottish entrepreneur Hugh Stewart, and by Nevis Capital. UKube-1, Scotlands first satellite, was designed and built by Clyde Space in Glasgow and was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in July. Payloads in UKube-1, a collaboration between the UK Space Agency, industry and academia, include the first global positioning system device to measure plasmaspheric space weather, and a camera that will take images of Earth and test the effect of radiation on space hardware using a new generation of imaging sensor.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 18:52:58 +0000
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