20:20 vision

Last month’s news from Longbridge reignited the now familiar debate about the UK’s engineering future: is there any way we can compete with low labour cost economies, or should we just concentrate on the specialist stuff?

With the consensus being that intellectual property and high-value products are the way forward, there can be few companies more qualified to carry the UK baton than Chelmsford’s e2v technologies.

e2v, which leads the world in the development of high-powered microwave and sensing equipment, appears to tick all the right boxes. Its products, designed and manufactured in the UK, find their way into everything from the latest dental equipment to multi-million pound space telescopes.

Its technical advice is regularly sought on some of the world’s biggest science projects and, most recently, it formalised an already healthy relationship with academia by opening a centre of excellence at Brunel University.

And if this isn’t enough to get trade and industry ministers slavering, e2v has even bucked an apparently irreversible trend by exporting products to China.