Third Prestigious Queen’s Award for World-Leading Safety Innovator
As part of the Queen’s birthday celebrations, companies around the country will be awarded with the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise.
This highly sought-after award is a mark of quality for British businesses. A seal of approval that speaks volumes about a company. For A-SAFE to win this award for the third time is testament to decades of hard work.
A-SAFE design and manufacture the most advanced industrial safety products in the world and have a long history of scientific development and engineering innovation. Established in 1984, A-SAFE invented the world’s first industrial strength polymer safety barrier. The company evolved from manufacturing polythene films, then using the waste from this manufacture to produce plastic cores, which led to the creation of polymer pallets and in 2001, the development of polymer safety barriers. Their customer-focused approach has seen their products continue to develop year-on-year, with the launch of 3rd generation polymer barriers in 2015 and bespoke solutions for workplaces in many industries. This revolutionary type of safety barrier is designed to flex, absorb impact forces, then reform to its original shape; a transformative milestone in the evolution of safety in the industrial workplace.
Their world-leading Innovation Centre in Halifax proudly recruits polymer physicists, design engineers, and electronics engineers; it is the humble birthplace of some of the most advanced polymer technology and cutting-edge safety engineering in the world. A-SAFE invest millions of pounds in custom-built machinery to ensure their quality and attention to detail is inherent throughout every element of the process. From research and development to design, testing and manufacture. The entire end-to-end process is owned and controlled at their HQ in the UK, before the final product is exported around the world. They have released next generation safety barriers with more technology, more engineering design, more safety features. The latest developments include electronic safety systems that go beyond protection, designed to detect, monitor and record damage. Exporting these innovations to six continents and driving global standards of workplace protection ever higher.
A-SAFE maintain the spirit of a local business, whilst achieving the far-reaching impact of a global presence. This has seen them awarded the Queen’s Award for outstanding achievement in international trade for the third time. British workplaces are amongst the safest in the world; it’s thanks to A-SAFE’s international trade that companies in many countries can now benefit from advanced workplace protection. Their knowledge is respected to such a great extent that they are technical authors of the world’s first and only official code of practice for workplace safety barriers; partnering with the BSI to create PAS 13. They are passionate about workplace safety and actively share that passion and experience worldwide, striving to create better safety conditions for ordinary workers in every workplace, in every industry, on every continent.
The “Global and Local” export strategy of establishing wholly-owned subsidiaries globally, gives international brands access to A-SAFE’s products locally. 17 subsidiaries have launched in Europe, America, the Middle East and Australia, complemented by an additional 39 trusted distributors worldwide. Export sales are further increased by selling directly overseas from the UK. Overseas sales have grown by 113% over the last three years and the proportion of sales exported has increased to 76% of total sales, with a cumulative average growth of 38% over five years.
A proud UK manufacturer, A-SAFE has moved forward again, integrating patented electronics and industry 4.0 IoT software into their offer. These new systems go beyond protection, designed to detect, monitor, record, and predict damage.