ONE of East Lancashire’s most successful companies will continue to prosper by focusing on the world’s four leading emerging economies, according to its new boss.

Paul Gillyon, managing director of Precision Polymer Engineering (PPE) in Blackburn, is set to expand sales of the firm’s high-tech rubber seals into the so-called BRIC markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Economists said the BRICs would in the next generation begin to replace traditional economies like the US and Japan, where American-owned PPE already has significant operations.

Mr Gillyon said: “All of the BRIC economies are potential markets for us.

“We have got sales staff dotted abroad but there are big chunks of the world where we have no distribution operations whatsoever.

“I have got experience working in, for example, the Asian Pacific area where we could improve our hold. I am very comfortable doing that.”

Mr Gillyon was headhunted from Thermo Fisher Scientific in Loughborough, a supplier of pharmaceutical products.

Bosses at PPE, which is owned by Illinois-based IDEX Corporation, were impressed with his track record of growing sales in foreign markets.

Meanwhile, Mr Gillyon said that he was lured by PPE’s similarity to Germany’s ‘Mittelstand’, the dynamic small and medium-sized businesses that power Europe’s strongest economy.

In recent years, the popularity of the firm’s rubber seals, which are used in products ranging from submarines to Formula One cars, have seen it enjoy double-digit sales growth.

And Mr Gillyon sees no reason why that cannot continue, securing a successful future for PPE, of Greenbank Road, which employs 250 in East Lancs.

He added: “We have still got a lot of capacity at the site and after that there’s some land next to it we may be able to move on to.

“There is a real bright future at PPE to continue the growth because there’s still a lot of the world to target.”