Agripa are all set to roll out across Europe

JOHN Pitt, the Scot who claims to have invented all-weather football pitches, is set to expand his latest business, Agripa, from Glasgow across Europe.

The company, which sells a fresh type of advertising to be displayed on the side of lorries, has just received permission to patent the product throughout the continent.

Pitt told The Scotsman that UK pick-up at the firm would more than double company revenues this year to £5 million and that he had received calls from firms in Germany, Italy and Ireland.

The expansion will help to build on a string of recent contract wins, including the Post Office and entertainment giant Warner Brothers.

Pitt said: "This is a huge market and the patent success allows us to be the only company able to access it."

The unique aspect of Pitt’s invention is that the advertising board uses a type of mesh - allowing lorry displays to be changed frequently and without disturbance from the weather.

Sales were £2.5m in 2003, but are expected to comfortably clear £5m this year. Pitt said: "That is a conservative estimate based on us taking 1 per cent of the truck-using market."

Pitt made a £30m fortune when he sold Pitz, his ground-breaking sports facilities business, to venture capitalist 3i, but now feels bitter that he left the industry when he did.

He said: "I was the first to run all-weather football pitches, but now there are 77 different companies throughout the UK. I did not patent the idea, so I don’t receive a penny of that money."

Pitz includes the football pitches at Edinburgh’s Portobello, made famous by the opening credits to the 1994 movie Trainspotting.

Agripa’s product is now displayed on around 2,000 lorries in the UK. The company’s biggest customer is Tesco, which uses the medium to advertise several of its non-core products, such as CDs and DVDs.

Other clients include B&Q, while Warner Brothers used the mesh to advertise the recent release of Scooby Doo. The next target will be the crucial brewers market.

Pitt said: "This is an opportunity for this business to rise up pretty quickly - we learnt that through our first year of trading. The only way to learn is at the coal face."

Pitt, who won Ernst & Young’s Emerging Scottish Entrepreneur award in June, set up Agripa with proceeds from the Pitz sale.

He has yet to decide what he eventually wants to do with the business - refusing to rule out a potential flotation.

JOHN BOWKER The Scotsman