UK electronic components: the giants are global groups in UK wrappers — the real business is the fabs and the mid-market

About 134 UK electronic-components makers publish a full profit-and-loss, booking £12.0bn of combined turnover — but more than two-fifths of that money never touched a British factory. The two biggest names on the map are wrappers: Sensata Technologies, a New York-listed sensor group whose worldwide parent happens to be registered in Swindon, puts £2.77bn through its accounts; Cirrus Logic International — the old Wolfson Microelectronics — books £1.49bn of global chip sales through an Edinburgh company that lately employed about 125 people. Strip the wrappers away and the real UK industry appears: foreign-owned plants run on contracted margins for their parents (including the Newport fab the government forced China-owned Nexperia to sell), a quietly excellent mid-market of connector, sensor and power specialists, and a growth story that belongs almost entirely to space hardware and the data-centre build-out. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number.

Three kinds of company wear the same label

Before comparing any two lines below, sort the map into its three species — because their turnover and margin figures mean different things:

• Global groups in UK wrappers. Sensata (16,700 staff worldwide), Cirrus Logic International and Volex (12,385 staff, most of them in overseas plants — staff costs average about £20k a head, which no British factory pays) report worldwide or multi-country revenue through a UK entity. Their scale says nothing about UK manufacturing. All three keep their books in US dollars; we convert at recent rates (roughly $1.25–$1.35 to the pound, varying with each filing’s period), so their sterling figures move with the currency as well as the business.
• Foreign-owned plants and sales arms on administered margins. Texas Instruments’ UK company books £40.6M with 33 staff at a 26.8% “margin”; Microchip’s Caldicot operation runs at 39.8% — and its profit rose 38% in a year its sales fell. These margins are set by intercompany pricing between the UK entity and its parent, not by any market. Never rank them against an independent.
• Genuine UK operators — the Glenairs, Harwins and Pektrons — where the P&L describes a real business winning real orders. This is the tier the rest of the report is mostly about.

The giants

Read the table as two stories. The top four lines are corporate geography — Sensata’s pre-tax line swung from a £26.5M loss two years ago to £111M profit in its latest year, but those are the swings of a global group, not of anything happening in Wiltshire. The real UK signal starts at Glenair: £329M of connectors out of Mansfield, up 17% with staff up 12% — hiring-backed growth at scale, the best combination on the whole table. Against it, the semiconductor downcycle is written plainly across the Japanese-owned plants: Shin-Etsu’s Livingston wafer operation shrank 21% and its profit fell by nearly two-thirds, while Kyocera AVX cut revenue 12% and headcount 15% in the same year. GE Aviation Systems is the only loss-maker among the giants — £468M of aerospace electronics growing at 21% but still fractionally underwater. And Belkin is a reminder to read the names: £149M with 95 staff is a distribution arm for a consumer brand, not a factory. One year-end caveat for the whole table: these accounts run to dates between December 2024 and March 2026, so adjacent rows can be a year apart.

The fabs politics fought over

No corner of UK manufacturing has had more ministerial attention per pound of turnover than the companies in this section — Britain’s chip plants, each one owned from abroad and each one earning its keep in a different, complicated way.

The company now called Vishay Newport has had four names: Inhoco 2597, IR Newport, Newport Wafer Fab, Nexperia Newport. That last change is the famous one — the government ordered its China-owned parent Nexperia to sell the plant on national-security grounds, and the American components group Vishay bought it in 2024. The accounts show what all that drama was fought over: £64.9M of turnover, a £4.4M post-tax profit after a £17.6M loss the year before, and a workforce that shrank from 594 to 499 through the transition. But read the profit’s small print before calling it a recovery: it exists only because the plant invoiced a roughly £33M excess-capacity charge to a Vishay sister company in a year the directors describe as extremely low loading — strip out that parent-funded recharge and Newport traded at a loss, and the directors expect revenues to stay low. South Wales’ strategic asset is, financially, a modest plant kept in the black by its owner — the same administered-margin arithmetic we flag for TI and Microchip — and a sixteenth the size of the wrapper companies at the top of this map.

Plessey Semiconductors in Plymouth is the opposite arrangement: striking numbers, and a change of owner the headline figures don’t show. Its fab has spent recent years dedicated to microLED display work for Meta, and the accounts read like a plant on a contract rather than a company in a market — £54.7M of turnover and an £11.1M profit at a 20% margin, though about £12.5M of other operating income sits inside that figure, so the pure contract-trading margin is closer to breakeven. The £25M dividend — more than two years of profit, taking net assets down to £7.2M — was the outgoing owner’s pre-sale extraction: in August 2025 Plessey was sold to Haylo Labs, which arrived with a publicised £100M five-year investment plan, and the Meta arrangement was loosened after the sale to allow other R&D partnerships. The contracted margin is still what the arrangement pays, not what Plymouth could earn selling chips on the open market — but the plant now has an owner promising to spend rather than one harvesting on the way out.

The pattern extends beyond the fabs. Diodes Semiconductors GB (the old Zetex fab in Oldham, £62.0M at 10.5%) and Microchip’s Caldicot company (£40.4M at 39.8%, profit up 38% in a down year, headcount −15%) are both plants whose economics are set between them and their parents. Britain’s semiconductor industry, as the accounts tell it, is mostly a landlord of other people’s capacity.

The shape of the market

There is almost no small tier here. Just 17 of the 134 companies turn over less than £5M — component-making has a scale floor (equipment, certification, audited customers), and below it firms simply don’t publish a full P&L. The market’s centre of gravity is the £5–100M specialist: 103 of the 134 companies, 71–79% of them profitable, rising to 90% above £100M. By profitability this is one of the healthiest manufacturing maps we’ve drawn.

The best-run mid-market

The strongest operators in the £5–100M band, with the administered-margin entities set aside. What separates the leaders is specialisation: connectors and switches for aerospace and defence (Harwin, 17.2%; Amphenol, 21.7%; Axis Electronics, 23.2%), high-voltage and power conversion (Spellman High Voltage, 15.9%; A F Switchgear, 16.3%), RF for space (Filtronic Broadband, 26.7%). Commodity-adjacent lines run thinner — Welwyn Components’ resistors at 5.5%, Coilcraft Europe’s inductors at 5.5%.

…and a dozen more in the £5–40M band. Two entries we deliberately hold at arm’s length: Micross Components (£41.5M, a 44.5% margin that has climbed every year for six years — a genuine high-reliability niche, but a ratio that high usually contains group arrangements as well as trading) and the Texas Instruments / Microchip Caldicot pair discussed above, whose margins are intercompany arithmetic.

Growth: space and data centres, read with care

The headline grower is the real thing. Filtronic Broadband — Sedgefield, County Durham — rode its amplifier deal with the world’s biggest satellite operator from £20.8M to £52.7M in a single year, profit up five-fold to £14.0M, staff up 41%, cash doubled. Hiring-backed, profitable, organic: the rarest combination on any of our maps, and here it is in the North East.

The second theme is the data-centre build-out, the same force behind our data-centres map: Starline (power busway for server halls) grew 77% with staff up 34% and profit up six-fold, and A F Switchgear in Sutton-in-Ashfield grew headcount 40% to 306 while holding a 16% margin and paying £9M of dividends. Electricity infrastructure, not chips, is where UK electronics is compounding — the adjacent story to our electrical-equipment map.

Then the rows to discount. TT Electronics Power Solutions’ doubling with staff up just 3% has the shape of business moved between sister companies in a listed group, not share won. UAV Tactical Systems — the Leicester drone maker — grew 55% on defence demand but keeps a thin 4.3%, contractor economics. Spectrum Control grew 46% while cutting 14% of staff, which reads as order timing or a transferred line. And Connected Kerb doesn’t belong on this map at all in spirit — it’s an EV-charging network wearing a manufacturer’s label, losing £15.8M on £15.0M of revenue with net liabilities of £28M; treat its row as a category accident, not an industry signal.

Market structure: concentration is an artefact of the wrappers

On paper the top five hold 56.7% of the £12.0bn. But Sensata, Cirrus Logic International and Volex between them contribute £5.1bn — about 42% of the entire base — and virtually none of it is UK factory output. Set the wrappers aside and the domestic industry is a much flatter market of roughly £7bn: one £1.2bn defence-electronics anchor (Thales UK), a handful of £150–560M foreign-owned plants, and a hundred specialists below them.

An inherited industry

Three-quarters of these companies — 75 of 134 — were incorporated before 1990, the oldest profile of any map in this series, and just three since 2021. Nobody founds a components maker anymore; you inherit one, or you buy one. The register is a fossil record of exactly that: today’s Teledyne UK is the old e2v (and before that EEV), Diodes GB is the old Zetex, Vishay Newport has had four owners’ names. Ownership tells the same story — 84 of the 134 are corporate-owned, most from abroad, and only 46 remain in individual hands. Just 5% carry a Holdings/Bidco-style name: private equity has largely left this capital-hungry trade to the strategics.

What the map shows

1. More than two-fifths of the “£12.0bn UK industry” is a registration effect. Sensata, Cirrus Logic International and Volex report £5.1bn of essentially worldwide revenue through UK entities — the domestic trade is closer to £7bn.
2. Britain’s chip fabs work for their owners, not a market. Newport (£64.9M under Vishay after the forced Nexperia sale, in the black only via a roughly £33M parent capacity recharge over an underlying trading loss, 95 fewer staff) and Plessey in Plymouth (a 20% contract-plus-credits margin on Meta work; £25M dividended out by the outgoing owner before the August 2025 sale to Haylo Labs) earn administered returns — strategic assets on owner-set economics.
3. The mid-market is the industry’s real strength — 103 companies between £5M and £100M, three-quarters profitable, led by hi-rel connector and power specialists at 15–27% margins.
4. Growth is space and data centres. Filtronic (+153%, staff +41%, on its satellite-operator deal) and the data-centre power pair Starline (+77%) and A F Switchgear (staff +40%) account for most of the genuine, hiring-backed expansion — while the wafer and passive-component plants (Shin-Etsu −21%, Kyocera AVX −12%) sit in the global chip downcycle.
5. Beware administered margins. TI’s 33-staff UK company at 26.8% and Microchip Caldicot at 39.8% (profit up in a down year) are intercompany arithmetic — never benchmark an independent against them.
6. It’s an inherited industry: 75 of 134 companies pre-date 1990 and only three have been founded since 2021 — the scale floor keeps newcomers out, and the register mostly records changes of foreign owner.

Methodology and caveats

This covers only the 134 UK electronic-components makers that publish a full profit-and-loss; smaller workshops and design houses publish abridged figures and don’t appear, and several groups (Sensata, Cirrus Logic, Volex) report worldwide or multi-country revenue through their UK entities, which inflates the combined £12.0bn well beyond UK factory output. Several of the largest keep their books in US dollars — sterling figures are converted at recent exchange rates (roughly $1.25–$1.35 to the pound, varying with each filing’s period) and move with the currency. Year-ends range from December 2024 to March 2026, so adjacent rows can describe different twelve months. Margins at foreign-owned plants and sales arms are set by intercompany pricing and are not comparable with independents; large swings may be transfers between group companies rather than trading; extreme proportional outliers are excluded from the charts. Figures are approximate and business descriptions are directional — verify any specific figure against the company’s own accounts. This is analysis, not financial advice.