Less innovation, more international trade at 2012 Queen's Awards
Eight Cambridge tech companies have received royal recognition for their outstanding business operations in this year's Queen's Awards for Enterprise.
In a marked reversal of last year's awards in which six Cambridge companies won plaudits in the Innovation category and one in International Trade, this year most of the awards were received for the latter category and just two for innovation.
BlueGnome, Colortrac, Contamac, Domino Printing Sciences, Horizon Discovery, Spiral Software and Ubisense all won plaudits in the International Trade category. Ubisense was the only company to win in two categories, also joining metering technology company, Sentec in the Innovation.
Ubisense is a confident business, the only Cambridge high tech company to list on the stock exchange in the last six years. It received an Innovation Award for its core offering, the real-time location-tracking system that determines the 3D position of tagged objects with greater precision than other technologies such as GPS.
This technology has underpinned the strong international work leading to significant business growth, particularly in overseas earnings with export now representing 97 per cent of Ubisense's total earnings. "It is the highest honour to receive the Queen's Awards for Enterprise in not one but two categories," said Richard Green, CEO of Ubisense, who made a point of acknowledging his team.
Sentec's award for innovation meant it received a Queen's Award for the third successive year, recognition, said CEO Mark England, for its current sensor technology, Mobius, which provides utility providers and their customers with faster and more accurate information on energy consumption and is at the core of over ten million meters with 250 billion service hours across the US."
The rapidly expanding BlueGnome designs, manufactures and supplies microarray-based products for the investigation of genetic disorders to research centres in more than 35 countries. Its award came on the back of growing overseas sales by 167 per cent between 2008 and 2010.
Another first time winner was Horizon Discovery, one of the most exciting life sciences companies to emerge from Cambridge in recent years. Founded in 2007, its 'patient in a test-tube' technology supporting genomics R&D for personalised medicines has underpinned 361 per cent overall growth over the last three years, leading to an award for outstanding export growth.
Previous winner for International Trade, Colortrac has built on its past success to land another award. An experienced exporter, the firm manufactures digital image capture for large format copying and wide format scanning applications, and trades with every major country in the world – exports account for 96 per cent of its success.
Domino Printing Sciences, one of only 10 Cambridge companies to reach a market cap of over £10bn, also won an award for its continued rise in exports, which account for around 90 per cent of its product sales, earnings from which have steadily increased over the last six years.
Spiral Software was rewarded for continuous improvement of its maths-focused visualisation tools for the oil industry – exports account for 92 per cent of its turnover, with more than 80 companies using their software across 300 sites around the world.
Contamac has been developing ophthalmic medical devices such as contact lenses for 25 years and was also rewarded for demonstrating continuous growth over the last six years.
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