An audio-visual business based in East Anglia has snapped up a controlling stake in a UK video security products distributor for an initial £8.6m – with a further sum of up to £6.4m in the pipeline.

Midwich Group, based at Diss, has acquired 65% of Cardiff-based Cooper Projects Ltd, the parent company of DVS Ltd.

The remaining 35% share in Cooper will be held by its managing director Tim Goodson, commercial director Gavin Dunleavy and chief technology officer David Davies who will continue to run the company.

The additional sum of up to £6.4m is a fixed and performance-linked amount due in 12 months.

DVS was founded in 2003 as a specialist distributor of CCTV and video recording technologies, and has worked with leading global brand HikVision. In recent years, it has diversified into complementary technologies such as access control, intercom, and intruder detection.

Midwich employs about 250 people at its head office in Diss and had an operating profit of around £33.5m in 2019. It is expecting its profit before tax for the year ending December 31, 2021, will be at least £30m – even with product shortages.

In December 2020, it announced it was buying a £14.2m stake in an electronics company based in the United Arab Emirates (UEA) and Qatar.

It snapped up an 80% chunk in NMK Group, another value-added distributor of the products with a turnover of around £22m to help it to break into the Middle Eastern market.

DVS generated revenues of £37.4m to the year ending October 31, 2020, and profit before tax of £2.1m.

Midwich Group managing director Stephen Fenby said: “The acquisition of a controlling interest in DVS gives Midwich access to a significant segment of the AV market in which we currently have little presence, and which is expected to grow at around 8% per annum for the next five years.

“The knowledge and support of the experienced DVS team should help realise new opportunities for our customers in an increasingly converging technology market. Similarly, we believe that much of DVS’s extensive customer base uses or could use our core AV products in their projects. We are very excited at the prospect of supporting Tim, Gavin, David and the rest of the DVS team in accelerating the growth of the business.”

DVS managing director Tim Goodson said the Welsh business had ambitious growth plans. “Combining with Midwich gives us a unique product and support offering to our customer base.

“The Midwich team quickly grasped the breadth of applications of our technologies and how they could be used by their current customer base. Our technology can be used in many different applications, ranging from complex analytics to help drive sales and customer satisfaction in retail, to heat sensing in order to monitor fire risk, and biometric access control to maintain safety in educational establishments.”