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Inventor Sir James Dyson to share in £111m payout after vacuum cleaner company's bumper year

Sir James Dyson at the R&D centre of his company's Wiltshire headquarters - Copyright ©Heathcliff O'Malley , All Rights Reserved, not to be published in any format without prior permission from copyright holder.
Sir James Dyson at the R&D centre of his company's Wiltshire headquarters - Copyright ©Heathcliff O'Malley , All Rights Reserved, not to be published in any format without prior permission from copyright holder.

Billionaire Sir James Dyson’s fortune has received another huge cash injection with the results for the parent company of his business empire revealing a £111m dividend payout.

Annual accounts for Weybourne Group show it paid £60m in ordinary dividends and £55m in preference dividends in the year to the end of December.

Weybourne refuses to say how much of the business Sir James owns, saying only that he is “the majority shareholder”, with his family understood to hold almost all the remainder of the business which was founded on Sir James’s 1978 idea for a vacuum cleaner which did not require a bag.

Dyson
Sir James addresses staff at his company's on-site sports hall

While huge, the dividend payout will hardly register in the fortune of Sir James and the Dyson family, who are estimated to be worth £7.8bn, with Sir James’s personal fortune thought to be about £5bn.

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The highest paid director at Weybourne received £4.2m during the year, but the company again refused to say if this was Sir James.

The success of Sir James’s inventions and the company he founded on them has allowed him to purchase Britain’s largest private yacht – the 250ft Nahlin – as well as become one of the country’s largest landowners. His portfolio of more than 25,000 acres is bigger than the Queen’s 20,000 acre Sandringham estate.

The results filed at Companies House show a £773m leap in group revenues to £2.53bn in the year and pre-tax profits surging to £472.5m from £305.1m.

Dyson's 'supersonic' hair-dryer  - Credit: PA
Dyson's 'supersonic' hairdryer has been a big driver behind the group's surging sales Credit: PA

A spokesman for the company said rising demand for Dyson’s battery powered cleaners and the recently introduced hairdryer were behind the stronger performance, with “astonishing” growth in demand in Asia and the US.

The strong performance came despite investment in R&D rising by £38m to £180m in the year. Sir James’s business is a leading investor in development of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as battery technology. It has long been rumoured that his company is involved in developing technology for electric cars, but the billionaire has so far refused to be drawn on this.

Dyson has recently expanded its technology campus at its Wiltshire base, and last week launched its own university at the site, which Sir James hopes will encourage more people to go into the technology and engineering sectors – something the leading Brexit supporter says is crucial to the UK’s economy.

The accounts show that at the end of the year, the company had 8,721 staff worldwide, up from 6,435 the year before.

Sir James Dyson at his Wiltshire home: he is now one of the UK's largest landowners - Credit: Andrew Crowley
Sir James at his Wiltshire home: he is now one of the UK's largest landowners Credit: Andrew Crowley

The accounts also incorporate Sir James’s farming business, Beeswax, in which turnover rose 12.8pc to £14.1m and losses narrowed to £600,000 from £4.5m the previous year.

The stronger performance was attributed to a “good harvest, investing in land such as through drainage, and using new equipment such as drones for crop surveys to increase yields” by a spokesman for the company.

This is the first time the company has filed accounts as Weybourne, having been renamed at the start of the year from Holkam Group to avoid confusion with a business with a similar name. According to a source inside Dyson, the business was named Weybourne “after a village in north Norfolk where Sir James grew up as a child”.

Norfolk village of Weybourne sign 
Sir James Dyson's company is thought to be named after the Norfolk village of Weybourne near where he was raised

The accounts also show that in May of this year, after the period covered by the documents, Weybourne made a £32m property purchase. This is thought to be the former RAF base at Hullavington, a 517-acre site near the company's Malmesbury headquarters which the company has acquired.

Sir James said at the time the purchase was revealed that he needed the space to achieve his aim of making his UK research and development centre 10 times bigger, and floated the possibility of using the site to return some of the company's manufacturing to the UK from the Far East.

He also revealed his ambition to buy a Cold War-era Vulcan bomber, saying he has a passion for iconic examples of British engineering, and the ex-airbase could be the home for the giant warplane.

A Lightning fighter in the canteen of Dyson's Wiltshire base - Credit: Bloomberg
A Lightning fighter in the canteen of Dyson's Wiltshire base Credit: Bloomberg

Other examples of Sir James's celebration of British engineering include a working jet engine outside the Malmesbury research building, a Lightning fighter suspended above the canteen and a Harrier jump jet in the car park.

In the past Sir James has faced criticism over his business’s tax affairs, with allegations of using offshore arrangements – which are perfectly legal – to mitigate tax bills. Sir James has always strongly denied claims of tax avoidance, pointing to hundreds of millions in tax paid.

Backing this up, Weybourne’s accounts make prominent the amount of tax paid during the year, saying it rose by 34pc in the 12 month period to £321m.

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