Business News
Heading for a new workplace (L-R): Ricky Perks (procurement manager), Rayanne Jaffar (office manager) and Darren Elliott (perishables warehouse manager)
A royally good move for Y International UK
By Jon Griffin
A high-flying Birmingham export specialist is broadening its horizons in style – with a £15m move to brand new premises and dozens of extra jobs in the pipeline. Major new expansion plans for
Aston-based goods supplier Y International have been revealed just weeks after the firm won the coveted Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade 2017.
The firm, part of the seven billion
dollar turnover Lulu Group International chain founded by Indian billionaire Yusuff Ali, is poised to go from strength to strength with a relocation to a new 120,000 sq ft facility less than a mile from its home of the past four years. The £15m project will prove a
major jobs boost for the area, with 60 new staff set to be recruited via the local Jobcentre to add to the 180 staff hired since the distribution company first opened its doors in Aston in April 2013. The expansion, which will see the
new site become Y International UK Ltd European headquarters, also marks a major urban regeneration scheme for the Aston area, with road improvements and a new roundabout planned close to the new facility off Aston Hall Road. Operations director Tony Perks
said: “This facility will be six times the size of our current site. Essentially, we have outgrown our premises. The operation here is
20,000sq ft while the new site is 20,000sq ft just for frozen and chilled goods. “At the moment, we have got
eight production lines and we will be looking at 20 in the new facility. When we started here, we were only doing one eight-hour shift, now we are doing three shifts Monday to Friday and virtually operating around the clock. “Last year we did £25m turnover
purely from this site, with £10m for perishables and £15m for ambient goods (goods with more than six months’ storage life).” The Aston base exports more than 500 sea freight containers with 4,000 pallets of airfreight per year. The current Y International base
sources a wide range of supermarket products and exports them to the Middle and Far East to be sold through Lulu’s hypermarkets. The goods are processed at Aston with the addition of labels highlighting ingredients in Arabic along with
Yusuff Ali is presented to the Queen
‘We have got eight production lines and we will be looking at 20 in the new facility’
Lulu Group founder Yusuff Ali receives the Queen’s Award from former Birmingham Chamber president John Crabtree, Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of the West Midlands
their nutritional values as well as production and expiry dates. “We supply over 10,000 products
to Lulu, including food items such as cheese, yoghurts, coffee, baked beans and mustard, and non-food items such as toilet rolls, washing up liquid and Pampers.” Birmingham-born Mr Perks,
whose brother Ricky also has a key management role as procurement manager (perishables), said the planned move to the new Birmingham site coincided with other international growth plans by the Lulu empire. Lulu has 155 hypermarkets, primarily in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, plus sites in India, Malaysia and elsewhere. The company is opening on average a store a month. Mr Perks said the new Birmingham
site could be up and running by autumn 2018 or early 2019.
September 2017 CHAMBERLINK7
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