Airea: Yorkshire flooring firm shrugs off pressures as revenues lift

It came as the company also posted pr-tax profit of £0.2m, up from a loss of £0.04m in the same period a year prior.

The results come at a time when many manufacturers and textiles firms are facing increased pressures including the knock-on effects of the conflict in the Middle East.

Earlier this month, Birmingham-based Headlam said it had closed 28 of its 76 trade counters and cut just over 150 jobs as it works to continue trading after entering administration.

The firm said it had been hit by a number of economic headwinds including rising costs.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Médéric Payne, chief executive officer of Airea, said the firm had mitigated much of the impact from the Middle East conflict, despite the company having opened a Dubai office last year.

He said: “There's some impact for everybody from the cost of materials going up, so there has been a cost impact. But in terms of sales, we've been lucky that we've been able to get products still into places like Saudi.

“We're already in a much better place than we were last year in terms of performance, and now we’re trying to work out how the rest of the year will finish .

“Some sectors are not so straightforward, and some people have got stock stuck in different ports. But currently, we're managing to sell through.

“We are impacted as much as the operations are tough, but we've managed, I think, to mitigate a lot of the sales risk in the region.”

It comes as Airea continues its transition to a new manufacturing site in Ossett.

Mr Payne said the company was now finishing its training for staff as it moves from its former factory to the new site.

He added that AI will play a major role at the new site, but that the company expects to employ around the same amount of staff at the new location as its previous factory initially, with plans to potentially employ more staff as production grows.

Mr Payne said: ““AI is a huge subject. So the area that we're very focused on improving is quality and assurance checking.

“We have set up a number of quality control points on the new manufacturing line that mean that as the carpet tiles or planks go through the system, it takes 1000s of pictures of the same tile, and it can tell you within an instant of a second or second and a half, whether that tile is absolutely perfect. It goes beyond what the naked eye can even see or imagine.

“This is really a high degree of quality that puts us back into a very different category of improving the brand.”

Conleth Campbell, chief financial officer of Aiea,. added that the company was in a “much better” financial position than the previous year.

He said: “We built our platform for growth. We continue to strengthen our balance sheet, and hopefully, we will seize on opportunities that come our way in the market.”