Water works for Eden Springs as it plans £20m expansion

WATER cooler supplier Eden Springs will today unveil a £20 million expansion plan for its Blantyre-based UK operations as the acquisitive firm goes back on the takeover hunt.

The company, which has about 150 of its 375 UK staff in Scotland, aims to double its turnover to 60m over the next three years and take on a further 125 staff.

Most of the UK's high street banks are listed among the firm's 60,000 clients, as well as large groups such as BT.

The company provides 120,000 cooling towers in the UK, along with one million bottles of water.

As well as stalking other players in the water cooler market, Eden Springs will roll out other services next year, including workplace coffee machines from Italian firm Lavazza and fizzy drinks from SodaStream.

The firm is receiving grants from the Scottish Government of up to 200,000 over the next three years to help meet training costs for its staff.

UK managing director Jean-Marc Bolinger told The Scotsman: "But that's not why we're based in Scotland. We have our call centre and consumables supplies here and so it makes a lot of sense to have our headquarters in Scotland.

"I chose to move here rather than live in London, where a lot of people would expect our company to be headquartered.

"The money we receive from the government is tied very closely to training and, while very welcome, is a small part of our overall budget."

Bolinger said Scotland currently accounted for about 15 per cent of the company's turnover and that he would like to see the figure grow.

He said his takeover targets would help him to cover parts of the UK where the company was currently weak but that he accepted that deals coming onto the market rarely fitted in with pre-conceived plans.

Funding for the acquisitions would come from banking resources, Bolinger said, adding that Royal Bank of Scotland was the company's lender.

Across Europe, the company has 500,000 clients in 16 countries and distributes about 416 million litres of water each year.

Eden Springs was the subject of a boycott campaign by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) in 2008, because its European parent company is owned by an Israeli firm, which was accused of taking water from the disputed Golan Heights region.

At the time, Eden Springs UK defended itself by pointing to its Scottish origins; the company was created in 1999 through the merger of Water at Work, Northumbrian Springs and Nature Springs.

The three brands were brought together under the Eden Springs banner in 2005.

The SPSC claimed that the company lost several large public-sector contracts due to the boycott.But Bolinger yesterday said that the company's shareholders had been reassured by the support it had received from the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise and that it remained committed to Scotland as the location of its UK head office.