Key Facts
NEPIC is a membership organisation working with the region’s chemistry using industries – commodity chemicals, fine & speciality chemicals, polymers and composites, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, bioresources, biofuels and renewable energy and low carbon materials. More than 1,400 regional companies are directly involved or in the supply chain of these sectors and together they generate £26bn of annual sales, employ 190,000 people and export £12bn per year. The ambition of NEPIC is to build on this powerful industrial base to make the North East one of the most competitive and successful region in Europe for these industries.
NEPIC member companies are currently investing a further £7bn into the region by 2015. This expansion, together with the current demographics within the sector requires the industry to attract some 16,000 new employees into the sector. Through NEPIC the regions process industry companies are working to promote the attractiveness of this sector as a career opportunity and develop new routes to obtain a career in this well paid sector.
NEPIC also promotes the capability of the region and its industry and acts as a knowledgeable partner to help companies the sector and its supply chain with their new investments. The cluster gives the best advice on how to gain public sector funding for investment and R&D projects. It also has built up the trust amongst its members to be the channel to engage in benchmarking and best practice advice on many operational issues. Efficiency improvement programmes operated by the cluster has helped the region secure jobs and delivered millions of pounds of bottom line benefits to members.
Over the past twelve months membership of NEPIC has grown considerably, we now have over 420 members companies and over 120 associate member companies, making by far and away the strongest most influential body this regions process sector has ever seen.
The reason NEPIC is so successful can be easily summed up by a quote from the European Union Cluster Publication which stated that:
“Clusters are groups of inter-related industries that drive wealth creation in a region. Often they represent the entire value chain of a broadly defined industry from suppliers to end products, and are interconnected by the flow of goods and services throughout this chain”.
This is a true reflection of NEPIC as we strive to ensure that the regions manufacturing and supply chain companies work together to increase their profitability through sharing best practice, overcoming common obstacles and threats, and in doing so adding to the regional economy.
