Where fake grass is greener

Demand for artificial playing surfaces is the unlikely saviour of Dundee's struggling textile industry, finds Mike Woodcock

MOST people would tell you that the jute industry and textiles are ancient history for Dundee but one company founded in the hey-day of such industries has rewritten the formula by creating and marketing the next generation of artificial surface for sports pitches to customers all over the world.

Bonar Yarns and Fabrics, once renowned as carpet makers, were a by- product of Dundee's rich heritage as a centre for the jute industry, but it has turned these principles to its own advantage and taken the business in an entirely new direction.

Synthetic sports pitches is one of the world's growth markets as more and more clubs and organisations in football, tennis, hockey and even rugby look to install indoor or artificial pitches that offer the same texture and feel as grass with lower maintenance costs.

In China there is demand for several hundred million square metres of artificial surfaces and Bonar Yarns has carved a niche for itself as one of the leading players in this specialist marketplace.

Alastair Scott, sales director, says, "We are a young industry in a fairly small, specialised niche area.

"The big volume textile sectors like cotton spinning and cashmere spinning have gone off to the Far East. But what we have shown is that we can compete on the world stage very happily."

Bonar Yarns is the last remaining part of the Low & Bonar plastics and packaging group based in Scotland after Low & Bonar moved its headquarters from Dundee to London two years ago.

The company has had a presence on the St Salvador Street factory site since the late 19th Century and its stone walls and large wooden- framed windows provide a fitting throwback to its industrial past.

Bonar Yarns was started as Polytape in 1966, which opened an extrusion facility in the city's Tay Works just as the market for polypropylene backings for carpets began to take off.

The company moved to its present site in the early 1980s and became part of the Low & Bonar group, specialising in carpet backings and making jute and cotton substitutes.

In 1985, Bonar Yarns dipped its toe in the market for modified grass products and began producing materials for the UK market. By the early 1990s, this market was showing signs of growth just as the UK carpet sector was shrinking.

As Scott explains, the company spotted an opportunity to develop an entirely new range of products using its skills, experience and international reputation and to transform the business.

Bonar Yarns began developing polyethylene products and, more recently, polyolephin mixtures which have opened up a gateway into the market for more durable, softer and truer artificial surfaces.

The company claims its Bonaslide and Bonagrass surfaces are a vast improvement on the hard knitted nylon artificial surfaces, tried and dropped by several English league football clubs in the 1980s.

"The big growth for us in the last five years has been in modified grass," he says. "We have gone from producing 100 tonnes a year to 4000 to 5000 tonnes a year.

"These are enormous figures now and we believe we can continue to progress at 10-15% per annum based on international business worldwide.

"What has opened up a new sphere for us is third generation pitches which are environmentally and player-friendly and very suitable for contact sports."

The move has seen the Bonar Yarns business grow by around 10% a year and has seen turnover soar to (pounds) 15 million in the last seven years.

International markets have been crucial to the success of the artificial grass side of the operation and exports now account for 75% of the business compared to just 25% ten years ago.

From an initial focus on Europe, Bonar Yarns has moved into artificial grass markets in America, Canada, the Far East, Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Its yarns can be found on artificial pitches in Barcelona, Moscow, Detroit, Seattle and Sydney and closer to home on the tennis courts at Queen's Club, the golf tees at St Andrews and at Rangers Murray Park training base.

The Far East has been a growing market for Bonar Yarns and the company is moving fast to exploit opportunities thrown up by the World Cup in Japan and Korea and the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

"A lot of the volume is in the club scene and in schools and colleges," says Scott. "In China there is something like 50,000 schools and we do well in America. A lot of the colleges and schools have their own pitches and play on them day in day out."

Bonar Yarns received a (pounds) 1.5m investment from the Low & Bonar group this summer to purchase new specialist machinery and technology as it moves increasingly into developing artificial grass yarns.

This follows (pounds) 3m of investment in the last two years and Scott believes this support is ensuring the company and its 160- strong workforce remains on a smooth axis of growth.

"The new machinery has given us productivity gains and the productivity per person is infinitely better than it was," he says. "We have seen gradual and positive development in the last five years and it has been done by building blocks. We haven't acquired anybody, we have just expanded and added more customers and more agents selling products in different geographic markets."

Despite the importance Bonar Yarns attaches to its jute industry heritage, the next step for the company could see it depart its inner city setting for a more modern locale in an industrial park.

Scott says the company is steadily "out growing" its factory and is beginning to explore alternative locations but he stresses the company wishes to remain in Dundee.

He is convinced the company's Dundee location has given it a strong hand in dealing with these markets as the city enjoys a strong residual reputation in the textiles sector and a growing one in the technology sector.

Scott cites the example of his latest trip to Beijing, from which he returned last week, where the first thing that greeted him on a visit to a company warehouse in Beijing was a shipment of NCR automated teller machine parts from the city.

Much of Bonar Yarns's oil-derived raw materials are also sourced from nearby Grangemouth and Teeside rather than the traditional jute growing countries of the Far East. "We don't want to go away because it works very well for us here," he adds. "We have a good base for the business, a lot of skills and we are building up our knowledge base, so why go away?"

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