Philip Davis, managing director of Uniglaze at new Costessey. Picture: Denise Bradley

More than 300 jobs at a Norwich-based double glazing firm have been saved after the company was brought back from the brink of collapse.

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The Evening News understands that Uniglaze was 15 days away from going into administration before a refinancing package was brokered with a local partner and existing shareholders to keep the firm - which has a turnover of £22.5m a year - in business.

It means massive relief for the staff and their families who were facing redundancy at a challenging time in the jobs market.

Philip Davis took over as managing director of Uniglaze on February 1 to turn the ailing business around and is now optimistic that the firm – which has its major manufacturing base on Forest Way, New Costessey, beside Norwich’s southern bypass – can start to grow again.

He said: “The business has had a fairly rocky few years but has now been refinanced through the voluntary arrangement. Creditors will get 71p in the pound, but they would probably have got nothing if we had been wound up.

“From the customers’ point of view, the deal means they get continuity, we are still the same business, the warranties are still maintained and for our 315 staff, they keep their jobs. If we had been wound up, they would have been out of work.”

Uniglaze entered into a voluntary arrangement, where a company makes a court-approved agreement with its creditors, of formally agreed terms for the settlement of its debts.

The arrangement arose in May after HMRC refused to enter into a repayment agreement with Uniglaze.

Uniglaze owed £4.6m to unsecured creditors but has worked out a deal to pay its creditors - mainly suppliers - 71p for each pound they are owed, so that it can stay in business. Customers, and warranties on their products, will not be affected.

Uniglaze has been losing money in recent years, posting losses of £800,000 to the year end July 2009 and losses of £1m the following year.

“If it had not been for the VA, it would have been about a £1m loss for the current year,” said Mr Davis.

A key part of the new arrangement sees major investment from window frame manufacturer Swift Group Holdings from the Sweet Briar industrial estate in Norwich, along with a cash injection from existing shareholders.

Mr Davis said: “The plans for the future are to fundamentally change the way the business operates. There will be no redundancies but there will be significant cost savings in raw material utilisation and a big change in the way we deal with waste.

“The vision is to continue with a £22.5m turnover, break even within the first year, reduce waste, expand slowly and maintain stability.

“We have been improving quality and the quality of our service and we want to get back most of the customers we lost five or six years ago and re-establish ourselves in East Anglia as the pre-eminent unit manufacturer, which we were until 2005/06.”

Uniglaze has a 168,000 square foot manufacturing base at Forest Way where it makes make 3,500-4,000 double glazing units a day, and a small unit at Spar Road, Hellesdon.

He said a number of factors lay behind the company’s decline.

“The business was successful up until about 2004, operating on two sites in Norwich and one in Thetford and then decided to build new facilities with an £8m building and £6m of plant at New Costessey,” he said.

“Then things went wrong. The market in terms of both volume and pricing went against the whole industry. Glass became much more sophisticated and the whole industry was faced with rising costs while the customer base was not really prepared to pay the prices needed to cover those costs.

“Also, the business invested all that money in the plant but did not change the way it ran, so while it invested in a state-of-the-art factory, it did not change its operations.

“The trading losses were a result of a difficult market and a failure to bring its operating procedures up to date.”

It is still facing a challenging market, with glass prices rising 15pc in April.

Mr Davis said the creditors had endorsed the terms of the VA.

“They are now being paid,” said Mr Davis, “and have continued to show their support for the business and virtually all suppliers have offered us the same trading terms we had before. It shows they have confidence in the business and we are now able to turn it round and get it back to profitability.”

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