Business
186 UK SME Winners Revealed on 60th Anniversary
A Cotswold soap-maker, a Warwickshire 3D-printing pioneer supplying supercar manufacturers and an Edinburgh tech-refurbishment social enterprise are among 186 organisations honoured this year with The King’s Awards for Enterprise, as Britain’s most prestigious business accolade marks its 60th anniversary.
The 2026 cohort, which includes 76 winners for international trade, 52 for innovation, 36 for sustainability and 22 for promoting opportunity through social mobility, underlines the growing breadth of the awards first presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966. Renamed in 2022 following the King’s accession, the honours have now recognised more than 8,000 British businesses across six decades.
A sustainability story written in soap
For Emma Heathcote-James, founder of the Little Soap Company, the recognition vindicates an approach that has prized principles over margins since she began hand-crafting bars from her Cotswold cottage in 2008.
“We don’t make the profit that we perhaps could if we made everything in China, but every single decision that we make is putting the planet and people first,” said Heathcote-James, 49, whose products are now stocked by Waitrose, Tesco and Boots.
The business, which turns over around £2.4 million and employs 13 staff, manufactures exclusively in Scotland and northern England, home to the few soap factories Britain has left, and produces vegan-certified, cruelty-free ranges in recycled packaging.
It has not, however, been insulated from the macroeconomic squeeze. Chief operating officer Sharon Redrobe, who is married to Heathcote-James, said geopolitical tensions had pushed up the cost of raw materials including the essential oils used as fragrances, while greenwashing by some competitors remained a source of frustration. Winning as a small, independently financed business, she said, was the company’s “biggest coup” to date.
Little Soap Company has deliberately avoided external investment, wary of pressure to grow margins by switching to cheaper inputs. “It’s really important that we can demonstrate you can have a successful business and still do things correctly from the start,” Heathcote-James said.
From a mother’s garage to the supercar grid
In Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, RYSE 3D has secured an international trade award after export orders rose by an extraordinary 2,300 per cent to £2.24 million over three years. The company manufactures high-performance 3D-printed parts for more than 20 of the world’s leading supercar marques.
Founder Mitchell Barnes, 29, started developing a 3D printer in his mother’s garage as an undergraduate, using his student loan to build the first prototype and selling the service to coursemates after successfully printing a model for his car-design degree. He is among the youngest ever recipients, and has now collected a second King’s Award in as many years, having won his first at 27.
“It’s a royal honour,” Barnes said. “You don’t believe it when you first get it, but then winning two is even more insane.”
The business, which employs 25 people, exports principally to Latvia, Denmark and the United States, although the tariff regime introduced by Washington last year has eaten into US returns. Healthy margins have allowed RYSE 3D to absorb some of the impact, but Barnes said the team had had to redouble efforts elsewhere to compensate, including launching an automated online ordering tool aimed at everyday customers.
To address a chronic skills shortage, the company has taken to recruiting from outside the sector altogether, training former coffee baristas as 3D printing engineers. Barnes plans to open offices on both the east and west coasts of the United States before the end of 2026.
Refurbishing devices, repairing communities
Edinburgh Remakery, a ten-strong social enterprise honoured in the sustainability category, refurbishes and resells used technology, donating devices to people experiencing digital exclusion and routing unsalvageable components to specialist processors including the Royal Mint, which extracts gold from old motherboards.
Chief executive Elaine Brown said the team had been overwhelmed when the news arrived: “There was much jumping up and down in the remakery that day and a few more cakes were had just to celebrate.”
Demand for the service has surged as businesses retire PCs ahead of the end of support for Windows 10, but Brown argued that many of these machines could be given a second life by being fitted with alternative operating systems. “Being a business for good has been good for business,” she said. “We’ve grown our turnover, we’ve grown our engagement, and the King’s Award is the icing on the cake.”
Winners universally described the application process as exhaustive. Serial entrepreneur Will Fletcher, 46, who oversaw the promoting opportunity category as a judge, said the assessment was deliberately rigorous.
“It’s a really, really thorough process,” he said. “You always get a few that are out-and-out winners, and then there’s a few really tough cases.”
The category, Fletcher noted, rewards profitable companies that channel resources back into their communities, work that is “time-consuming to do properly and not directly linked to how much profit the company makes”. His own former business, Recycling Lives, won the award four times, including in 2019 for supporting ex-offenders into employment, where reoffending rates among participants ran at less than 5 per cent against a national average of around two-thirds. Fletcher now runs Car.co.uk, a Lancashire-based digital car-buying platform, which itself takes home a 2026 award for innovation.
Taken together, this year’s roll call suggests that British SMEs continue to find competitive advantage not in spite of their values, but because of them, a message the King’s Awards have championed, in one form or another, for sixty years.
Paul Jones
Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.
Rav Wilding joins us with the latest crime headlines.
From a shocking BBC investigation exposing scammers abusing dogs to con animal lovers, to how to spot a shop used by organised crime — plus why Paddington Bear needed a police escort.
To watch this with subtitles go to BBC iPlayer and search for Morning Live from 06/05/2026.
The state government has committed another $1.5 billion to its housing spend ahead of the budget, while at the same time ruling out any significant changes to stamp duty.
Business
Thai Board of Investment (BOI) approves TikTok’s $25 billion investment in data infrastructure
The Thai Board of Investment (BOI) has officially approved a $25-billion data infrastructure investment by TikTok, part of a larger $29-billion package of six major projects aimed at bolstering Thailand’s digital economy.
Key Points
- Investment Scope: TikTok’s $25-billion investment is focused on expanding data storage and processing infrastructure in Bangkok, Samut Prakan, and Chachoengsao.
- Economic Context: The project is part of a total of $29 billion in new investments approved by the BOI, reflecting a 2.4-fold year-on-year surge in investment applications in early 2026.
- Strategic Objectives: The infrastructure expansion is intended to support the rising demand for digital services and strengthen Thailand’s position in regional digital connectivity and AI-aligned growth.
- Workforce Development: TikTok has pledged to provide educational resources, including digital literacy and e-commerce training, to create new business opportunities for Thai entrepreneurs.
- Corporate Presence: TikTok, owned by ByteDance, has operated in Thailand since 2021 through its regional office, TikTok Technologies Co, and currently serves millions of users and business entities across Southeast Asia.
The total investment value of TikTok ‘s data infrastructure project in Thailand is 842 billion baht (approximately $25 billion). This large-scale expansion, approved by the Board of Investment (BOI) in May 2026, involves installing additional servers and expanding data storage and processing infrastructure.
The project will focus on strengthening regional digital infrastructure with facilities across Bangkok, Samut Prakan, and Chachoengsao. This latest approval follows a previously granted 127-billion-baht data-hosting project in 2025 and a broader commitment by TikTok owner ByteDance to invest in Thai digital literacy and e-commerce. The investment comes amid a surge in Thai digital sector applications, which exceeded 1 trillion baht in the first quarter of 2026.
This massive undertaking involves expanding servers and data processing capabilities across Bangkok and surrounding provinces to meet increasing digital demand. Beyond infrastructure, TikTok has committed to supporting Thailand’s digital workforce by developing literacy and e-commerce curricula for local entrepreneurs, further cementing the country’s role as a regional hub for digital services and AI-driven growth.
The surge in digital sector investments in Thailand is primarily driven by massive capital inflows into data infrastructure and a strategic shift toward an AI-centered economy. The Board of Investment (BOI) recently reported that investment applications in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded 1 trillion baht, a 2.4-fold increase year-on-year, fueled by mega-projects in digital and electronics sectors.
A major catalyst for this growth is the expansion of digital infrastructure, highlighted by a $25-billion investment from a local unit of TikTok to install servers and expand data processing across Bangkok and neighboring provinces. Global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) processing and cloud services now accounts for 86% of the total digital investment value, attracting investors from Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, Thailand is positioning itself as a regional semiconductor and electronics hub through national strategies aimed at developing a high-tech workforce and supporting AI-driven hardware demand.
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