'It’s really important to celebrate great traditional industries': List reveals 75 fastest growing, independently owned and managed businesses in Northern Ireland
Lisburn company tops this year’s list with an estimated turnover of £4.5m, with two Newry firms in second and third place
UK's highest hit regional B2B media and news site Insider has published the inaugural Northern Ireland Scale Up 75, our list of the 75 fastest growing, independently owned and managed businesses headquartered in Northern Ireland.
The list includes Northern Ireland companies turning over at least £1m a year, formed in the last 15 years, excluded academies, colleges, schools and trusts, and removed shell companies, subsidiaries and companies that are housing trusts.
The site has partnered with Red Flag Alert Technology Group to produce the list, which is based on the firm's data and refined by Insider Media's research team.
The Scale Up 75 list and roundtable has been sponsored by accountants Sumer NI.
The top spots of our Scale Up 75 list aren’t dominated by apps or tech, but by traditional industries in areas like engineering, food and drink and construction.
Lisburn-based NSD Trading, the company behind Nu Delhi Lounge & Spice Restaurants, tops this year’s list with an estimated turnover of £4.5m, with construction firm MAC D- M&E in second spot and Newry-based Pronto Engineering in third place.
Other local businesses on the list include Woodgreen Furniture and Interiors in Ballymena, Coalisland Filling Station, Dungannon, Solid Subs, Newtownabbey and AIC Group in Armagh.
The list is ranked by estimated turnover with each company also given a growth score. This score is a predictive metric designed to assess a company's likelihood of achieving significant growth, specifically a 20% increase in turnover within the next 12 months.
This scoring system, which runs from 0 to 100, is based on analysis of four years of financial data and refined using statistically significant indicators of growth.
Northern Ireland is home to 790 scale ups, according to the ScaleUp Institute’s 2024 Annual Review, with 465 companies on the verge of entering the classification.
Scale ups remain a key to future UK prosperity and represent 55 per cent of UK SME output at £1.45 trillion despite only accounting for 0.6% of the business population.
Red Flag Alert founder Richard West said: “Growth is in every industry, and you don’t have to give it a new name like Meditech, RegTech or Fintech.
"It’s really important to celebrate great traditional industries and encourage understanding of the 135,046 companies we list, who on average employ 17 people and turn over £534bn per year.
“We need to encourage new leadership in these industries, as the average age of directors is 50 years old and retirement beckons. The next generation need to know you don’t need a degree to lead a business.
“It will be interesting to see how profitable these remain as the government’s latest Budget will probably cost the average employer between £50,000 and £100,000 per year in NI, wages and business rates.”
This is the first year Insider Media has published the list with a series of interviews with the leaders of some of the companies that are featured on the list also planned.
A roundtable event will be held - on June 19 in Belfast - which will be attended by businesses from the list and other exciting, growing scale ups.
Interested in participating? Contact our editor Stephen Emerson.