Hot 100 2013 – 41: Durbin

The basics

Company name: Durbin
What they do: Specialist global medical and pharmaceutical supplier
Headquarters: Harrow
The Boss: Leslie Morgan

The financials

Latest turnover (£,000): 65,468
Four-year compound sales growth (%): 36
Latest Ebitda (£,000): 1,646

The details

Since buying the company off the Durbin brothers in 1999, Leslie Morgan, a trained pharmacist, has been growing the company at a phenomenal rate. In the last four years alone, sales have more than doubled to £65.5m.

From its warehouse near Heathrow – where the company stocks more than 20,000 medical products – Durbin imports and exports pharmacuticals and medical equipment to more than 10,000 customers in 184 countries. The company has a 100-strong workforce across four premises and eight separate divisions, including clinical trials, family planning and managed access programmes. Clients range from GPs and pharmacies to governments, military and disaster relief organisations

In addition to its lucrative distribution business, Morgan runs the company’s charitable division which delivers still-in-date excess medical supplies worldwide to communities in need.

“Over the years, £28m worth of in-date excess medical supplies have gone through Durbin to different charities around the world,” says Morgan, who this year received an OBE in the New Year Honours list for services to the pharmaceutical industry and to charity.

Morgan adds that in terms of business growth, Durbin’s clinical trials division is growing the fastest. “When one company wants to compare a drug to another drug, they have to buy the other company’s drug and do the trial to see which is better – we can supply them with it. As the price and complexity of drugs go up, clinical trials are becoming more important. So there is still plenty of growth for us.”

Compound annual growth over the last four years is 36 per cent, with pre-tax profits of £1.6m.

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