The black ink on the accounts show a fall in sales and profits, but the boss of a Fife electronics firm knows the figures don’t tell the whole story.
When Dynamic EMS owner John Dignan thinks back to 2020 he feels nothing but pride at what his staff achieved.
Like many other manufacturers, the company faced tough market conditions when Covid hit.
But the Dalgety Bay business kept operating, entering new markets to aid the Covid effort, adding ventilator companies and hospitals to its customer list.
The effort made by staff was “simply outstanding” and not a single redundancy was made among the 86-strong workforce.
Mr Dignan puts the company’s success down to the workers at the bespoke electronics firm.
He said: “The people we have here are really good at what they do. They are critical to our businesses and work extremely hard.
“We didn’t close during Covid. We worked on ventilators, signed infrastructure business and manufactured for clients like hospitals.
“As we come out of the pandemic, the results say our sales are down.
“But we still made profits and we still managed to satisfy our customers.”
Strong customer base
The newly filed accounts show Dynamic EMS recoded sales of £8.5 million for the year ending December 31 2020. This is a reduction of £1.3m from 2019.
Pre-tax profits last year were £327,000, a fall from £411,000 the previous year.
The company’s key markets include clean water systems, wastewater treatments, utilities, fire prevention systems and the national grid.
The firm has also engaged with organisations involved in blood analysis and disease detection, contamination monitoring and antibody diagnostic testing.
Mr Dignan said: “A lot of our customers have been here a long time, but we are growing our customer base into some emerging technologies like Internet of things, wearables, agritech and aquaculture.
“We’ve got quite a longevity in our customers, so they work well with us.
“Some of our foundation customers are the ones that we’ve been working with for over 15 years.
“Once we get customers under our roof, we never really lose them.”
Planning for growth
Mr Dignan joined the business in 2005 and became managing director in 2011. Seven years ago he acquired the company.
Now the business has shown resilience during the pandemic, he expects growth will follow.
The managing director said: “We were growing at a rate of about 12%. The foundation for the business moving forward is really solid.
“We’re sitting with our £7.4m order book at the moment and that’s increasing.
“So we see the future as being fairly rosy.”
Dynamic EMS can trace its history to 1957 when Rochester UK was incorporated as a sister company of Rochester Inc. USA and operated from Kent.
In 1989 Rochester Instrument Systems acquired Highland Electronics Alarm Systems and its associated contract electronics manufacturing business, and the entire manufacturing operation was relocated to Fife.
The name changed to Dynamic Logic in 2000 and then to Dynamic EMS when a management buyout occurred in 2005.