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Papers strength means filing will never go out of fashion

The advent of computers and the internet has, if anything, increased demand for reading and storing pieces of paper, according to Tony Brown.

"People seem to like paper," he says. "They trust it more [than electronic forms of information].

If paper were to disappear, Mr. Browns company would not have much of a future. Aged 72, he is Chief Executive and owner of Bisley, one of Europes biggest makers of filing cabinets.

Mr Brown has worked at the company for 49 years and been in charge since 1970, when he bought it from his father Freddy - who started it in 1931 from a background in sheet metal working.

Bisley is based in a sprawling factory stretching back from a quiet countryside lane in the Surrey town of the same name, a short distance from Woking. Inside the plant - and another, larger unit in Newport, Gwent - Bisley last year made 900,000 filing cabinets, in 50,000 shapes and sizes.

Mr Brown lives within walking distance of the Bisley plant. He says he has never seriously considered selling the company - and is still a long way from retiring.

"I cannot imagine life without working," he says. "I get upset if I go away for too long, I miss hearing the sound of machinery."

But to take over much of the day-to-day running of the company, three years ago Mr Brown recruited John Irwin, aged 57, as managing director. While Mr Brown says he "keeps an eye on matters" such as new designs and capital spending, Mr Irwin, with 20 years experience in the furniture industry, is the companys main face to the outside world.

The younger man says business conditions in the past six months have been extremely tough. Sales in the year to July 31 are likely to be 20 per cent down on last years £87m, while pre-tax profits - a healthy £7.5m in 2007-08 - are expected to be little above zero.

The one ray of light, says Mr Irwin, is the weakness of the pound against the euro, which has given a "fantastic" lift to the 40 per cent of Bisleys output that is exported, mainly to the rest of Europe. "We have started to see some decent export orders from countries like Germany in the last few months, which is encouraging," says Mr Irwin.

Employment at the two plants has been cut back to about 780 - from a peak two years ago of 1,000 - while overtime has been banned.

"I feel very strongly that I have got to do my best to keep employment here as high as I can," says Mr Brown. "I feel sorry for ordinary workers [at Bisley] who are facing difficulties due to a crisis that is largely the fault of the excesses in the banking industry."

The company is pinning its hopes of emerging strongly from the downturn on a long-running investment programme in which it has spent £40m in the past decade on improving automation at its two factories. Much of the job of cutting and bending pieces of steel - and then fitting them together to form finished cabinets - is left to high-tech machinery.

Due to the flexibility of the equipment, orders for new designs can be met fairly easily by changing the software running the machines. "We can make cabinets in volumes of as small as one if the customer really needs something unusual," Mr Irwin says.

Meanwhile colours can be altered to suit virtually whatever the customer wants; one of Bisley boasts is that its cabinets come in 18 shades of white.

"Office filing systems are fairly low value and contain a lot of air," says Mr Irwin. "Because of the shipping costs, it would be fairly pointless for a company in China to think about exporting products of this type to Europe."

Bisley has a cash balance of £20m which Mr Brown says provides some "insulation" against the effects of the downturn. It has kept selling prices fairly low in the past six months to keep its market share high against competitors such as Steelcase, the US office equipment producer, while sacrificing margins.

Mr Brown says his basic recipe for running the business has not changed over the past 30 years. "You have got to provide good quality products, offer a good service to customers and sell at acceptable prices," he says.

He says there is a decent chance of the company sales edging up again next year, on the assumption the recession slowly peters out. "I have always taken a long-term view of the business," he says. "Of course we have had a setback, but it is a temporary one."