Haughey's cool £11m as fridge firm profits soar

Willie Haughey, the Gorbals-born entrepreneur who founded Glasgow-based facilities management group City Refrigeration, banked a dividend of more than £11 million last year following strong growth in sales and profits at his family-owned business.

The group, which now employs almost 10,000 people in the UK and Australia working mainly for major retail chains, saw pre-tax profits surge by 58 per cent to 5.16m on the back of a 15 per cent rise in turnover to 304m.

Haughey - who left school at 15 with no qualifications before serving an apprenticeship as a refrigeration engineer - set up the company with his wife Susan in 1985 to service fridges in pubs. It has since grown into the biggest facilities management company of its kind in Europe with major interests in areas including cleaning, security and pest control.

The company said the 2010 performance had highlighted its strategy of building long-term partnerships with customers. Former Celtic FC director Haughey recently revealed that Asda had increased its spend with the group from 5m to 100m in the past decade and that the group as a whole was on track to increase turnover to more than 700m in three years.

Colin Seggie, City Refrigeration's finance director, yesterday said that growing demand from existing customers had played a key role in the 2010 performance and that trading so far in 2011 had continued to be strong.

"As well as winning business with new customers, we have also seen growth from many existing customers awarding additional contracts for us to provide more services to them."

He said the strong trading performance and healthy balance sheet had enabled the company to pay a 11.7m dividend to shareholders, but pointed out that it was the first significant payment in the past four years.

With the Haughey family owning 98 per cent of the company they will have received almost all of the payment. The company paid 1.3m to charities during the year, an increase of 1m on 2009.

Turnover in the facilities management and cleaning business grew to 228.2m from 179.1m in 2009. But in the project services arm, which includes construction and installation of refrigeration, bakery and other equipment, sales fell to 71.6m from 81.1m, blamed on difficult market conditions, although operating profits grew by 31 per cent.

The figures show that an increasing percentage of the group's turnover is being generated overseas, with a contribution of just under 46m in 2010 compared to 8.5m the previous year, due to strong growth at its Australian business.

Seggie said opportunities to expand into other markets including the US were currently being explored.