Close Brothers Asset Finance has recently refinanced cleaning products supplier Liquipak’s assets using the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).
The refinancing is intended to bolster Liquipak’s cashflow at a time when sub-contract work had temporarily slowed down.
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Sam Evans, area sales manager for Close Brothers Asset Finance’s manufacturing division, said: “Liquipak originally used their cash reserves (cashflow) to buy the assets they needed, but during a brief lull in the sub-contract work found their hard-earned reserves were starting to be hit and sensibly decided to utilise their assets through refinancing.
“We have been working with the Liquipak directors for some time – between them, they have over 30 years’ relevant experience, and theirs is a real success story.”
Evans explained that demand for Liquipak’s products increased “substantially” during the Covid-19 pandemic due to the need for bottled hand sanitisers and disinfectants, which resulted in the company utilising its cash reserves to keep up with the demand.
“At one point they were packaging 80,000 bottles of hand sanitiser a day for a well-known supermarket on two bottle-filling lines along with another 100,000 to 150,000 units of their own products on another two lines,” he said.
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By GlobalDataSimon Dickinson, managing director at Liquipak, added: “As every business owner knows, protecting cashflow is critical to success, as is the knowledge that customer demand ebbs and flows. Knowing this, it made sense to us to use our assets to protect our cash reserves and having worked with Close Brothers Asset Finance before, we were confident they would be able to help us with our refinancing.
“We’re really pleased with the flexible way Close Brothers Asset Finance structured the deal, understanding the importance of keeping cash flow unaffected. This partnership approach is something we truly value – they clearly understood what we wanted to do and worked out a deal that suited our needs.”
Close Brothers have provided funding to several businesses through the CBILS scheme. Earlier this year, it funded equipment for Manchester-based printing company MP+H Packaging.
