Max Letek – Power Tools & Garden Machinery Writer
Genpower Ltd, the family business behind Hyundai generators and JCB Power Tools, has filed its most revealing accounts yet. They tell the story of a company that overreached, paid the price, and is now gambling that a famous yellow brand can save it
On a business park in Pembroke Dock, a small Welsh town perhaps better known for its ferry terminal than its industry, sits the headquarters of one of Britain’s more quietly significant power equipment distributors. Genpower Ltd employs 114 people, ships tens of millions of pounds worth of generators, lawnmowers, pressure washers and power tools every year, and holds the UK distribution rights for Hyundai’s entire power equipment range as well as the worldwide licence for JCB’s tools division.
It is, in other words, a substantial operation. Which makes the accounts it has just filed with Companies House all the more striking.
The financial statements for the 18-month period ending 30 September 2025 – filed on 7 July 2026, a few weeks past it’s deadline – record a loss of £1,853,142. They show a gross margin that has collapsed from nearly 27% to just over 21%. They reveal that the company sold its own headquarters building to pay down debts. And they confirm that the family founders, Roland and Lisa Llewellin, restructured the entire corporate group through a new holding company in July 2025, quietly stepping back from direct ownership of the trading entity they built from scratch two decades ago.
The question those accounts pose – and do not entirely answer – is whether Genpower’s remarkable growth story is merely pausing for breath, or whether the company has taken on more than it can carry.
A family business, and a very big number
Genpower was incorporated in March 2006 by Roland Llewellin, a former haulier and farm worker from Pembrokeshire, and his wife Lisa. Starting with a small range of own-brand generators under the Evopower label, the company gradually built an import and distribution operation that would eventually land it the UK and Ireland exclusive for Hyundai Power Products – a partnership that provided the foundation for everything that followed.
By 2021, the business was generating £20m in annual turnover and a pre-tax profit of £1.54m. It had 100 staff, a 120,000 square foot warehouse in Pembroke Dock, ambitions to reach £50m in sales by 2025, and a shelf full of awards – including recognition from the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 and the Wales Fast Growth 50, where it collected a Sustainable Growth Award in 2023.
The turnover target, in one sense, has been hit. The 18-month accounts show revenue of £68.2m – an annualised rate of roughly £45m, close to the target on a like-for-like basis. What was supposed to accompany that revenue was profit. What actually accompanied it was something rather different.
The loss, and what is really behind it
A pre-tax loss of £1.73m, and a total loss after tax of £1.85m, is not a small number for a business of Genpower’s size. But to understand it properly requires looking past the headline.
The accounts record an operating loss of £76,413 for the period – a swing from an operating profit of £1.45m the year before, on lower revenues. That deterioration is real and concerning. But buried within the operating loss figure is a single item that accounts for the bulk of the damage: a non-cash impairment charge of £2,353,110.
In July 2023, Genpower acquired a group of businesses with the stated aim of expanding its brand portfolio and supply chain capabilities. The accounts do not name those businesses. During this period, however, the directors concluded that the carrying value of those investments was no longer supported by their recoverable amount. In accounting terms, the acquisition was written off to zero. The £2.35m charge recognises that write-down.
Critically, as the accounts themselves state, the impairment does not affect the company’s underlying trading operations or its cash position. The cash left the building in 2023 when the acquisition was made. What these accounts record is the formal accounting acknowledgement that it is not coming back.
Strip out the write-off and Genpower’s underlying operating performance looks rather different – something in the region of a £2.3m operating profit over the 18 months, before interest costs of £1.65m reduce that to a modest underlying pre-tax surplus. The business, at its operational core, is not haemorrhaging money. It is, however, carrying debts that are eating most of what it earns.
Selling the furniture to pay the bills
The most striking disclosure in these accounts is not the loss. It is the property.
Genpower sold its Pembroke Dock freehold during the period. The building – which had been revalued in June 2024 to £3.5m – was disposed of, with total proceeds from tangible asset sales reaching £4.44m. The company now leases it back, carrying operating lease commitments of just over £4m across the coming years, at roughly £625,000 annually.
The decision to sell the building was not forced on Genpower. It was a calculated move to address the company’s most pressing problem: debt. At the start of April 2024, Genpower carried net debt of £10,874,237 – a significant burden for a business of its size, carrying an interest rate of 13.15% with specialist asset-based lenders White Oak and LDF Finance. By the end of the period, net debt had been reduced to £3,089,344.
That is a reduction of nearly £7.8m in 18 months. The mechanism was the property sale, combined with a determined effort to run down stock levels, inventory fell from £10.1m to £7.25m, freeing up working capital. The result is a company that looks considerably less financially precarious than the headline loss figure suggests: less debt, lower interest exposure, and a new supply chain finance facility of US$4.75m (approximately £3.59m) secured from a new lender for mid-2026.
The trade-off is permanent. Genpower no longer owns its headquarters. The £625,000 annual lease cost is a fixed overhead the business must meet regardless of trading conditions. Selling to lease back is a rational response to a liquidity problem; it is also, in a meaningful sense, irreversible.
The margin question nobody is answering
Beneath the impairment charge and the debt restructuring lies what may be the most important financial development in these accounts, and the one that receives the least explicit attention from the directors.
Gross margin fell from 26.9% in the year to March 2024 to 21.5% across this period. On revenues of £68m, that compression represents approximately £3.7m of gross profit that simply did not materialise. It is the reason operating expenses exceeded gross profit – a situation where the business spent more running itself than it earned from its core trading activity.
The accounts identify no single cause. The likeliest explanation is a combination of factors familiar across UK import and distribution businesses in this period: higher marketing costs, persistent sterling weakness against the dollar and yuan making stock more expensive to import; freight and logistics costs that have not fully normalised since the pandemic era; and consumer price sensitivity in the UK market limiting the ability to pass those costs on.
The directors note that inventory efficiency has improved and that “the improvement in inventory efficiency achieved during the period has been sustained, with stock levels maintained while turnover has continued to grow.” They describe this as “a structural improvement in stock management.” What they do not say is when, or by how much, gross margin is expected to recover. That omission matters. A sustained gross margin at 21.5% makes the financial model extremely fragile; recovery toward historic levels would transform it.
Fewer people, a higher wage bill
Genpower’s workforce shrank during the period – from 121 employees at March 2024 to 114 by September 2025. Seven roles gone, including E-commerce, marketing and SEO manager which have not been replaced and almost certainly from the fulfilment and warehouse operations transferred to the Newport 3PL entity as part of the group restructure.
The wage bill, however, rose. Total payroll costs came to £7,058,741 across the 18 months. Compared on a like-for-like annualised basis with the prior 12-month figure of £4.55m, the increase is modest – roughly 3.5%, in line with UK wage inflation and the rise in employer National Insurance contributions. But the direction of travel is clear: Genpower is paying more per head for a smaller team, as the workforce shifts toward higher-cost commercial, technical and management roles.
Directors’ remuneration across the board totalled £539,641 for the 18-month period – annualised, approximately £360,000 per year in aggregate for the five directors who served during the period. The highest-paid director received £205,968 over 18 months. The company also recommended a dividend of £65,000, down from £95,012 the prior year – a reduction that signals financial discipline without eliminating shareholder distributions entirely.
Whether that dividend will raise eyebrows depends on your perspective. In a year of losses and asset sales, some will argue that any distribution to owners is hard to justify. Others will note that £65,000 is modest by the standards of a business this size, and that maintaining a nominal dividend signals confidence in the underlying operation.
The Llewellin restructure: what GPR Topco means
Perhaps the most consequential development disclosed in these accounts is not a number at all.
From 21 July 2025, Genpower Ltd ceased to be a direct family-owned company. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of GPR Topco Ltd – a newly incorporated entity, registered at the same Pembroke Dock address, that now sits above Genpower in the group hierarchy. Roland and Lisa Llewellin remain the ultimate controlling parties, but now through GPR Topco rather than directly.
The accounts confirm that the reorganisation also resulted in Genpower’s fulfilment services transferring to another group company with effect from 1 August 2025, and its international sales activities moving to a further entity after the period end. Genpower Ltd itself is now described as focused solely on “the sale and distribution of its product brands across the United Kingdom and Ireland.”
The Topco structure is the architecture of a business preparing for something. It could be a refinancing on better terms. It could be preparation for bringing in a financial partner or external investor. It could be long-term succession planning for a family business approaching a generational transition. Or it could simply be a sensible tidying of a corporate structure that had become complex as the group expanded.
What it is not, the accounts make clear, is a sign of financial distress. GPR Topco Ltd remains under the control of Roland and Lisa Llewellin. No external party has taken a stake. Control has not changed hands. The hierarchy has simply been formalised.
The JCB bet, and why it is both the most exciting and most dangerous thing Genpower has done
In 2022, Genpower secured what appeared to be a transformational prize: the worldwide distribution licence for JCB’s portable power and petrol equipment, and subsequently the UK rights for JCB Tools across corded, cordless, hand and bench-top products. Roland Llewellin said publicly that the JCB business would become “the biggest part of our business over the next couple of years.”
The logic was compelling. JCB is one of the most recognised brand names in construction and engineering, trusted across professional and trade markets in a way that no own-brand importer can replicate. A distribution business that can put JCB-branded power tools in front of builders, farmers and automotive workshops worldwide is a very different proposition from one selling Hyundai generators on Amazon.
The accounts confirm that international sales – essentially non-existent in the prior year – reached £3.34m during this period. New distributors have been added in Poland and India. An agreement to sell Hyundai products into France has been signed. The company has appeared at the Eisenwarenmesse International Hardware Fair in Cologne, pitching for global distribution partners.
This is, unambiguously, an exciting strategic vision. It is also, equally unambiguously, an expensive and distracting one for a business in Genpower’s current financial position.
Building a global distribution network requires capital – for stock pipelines into new markets, for legal and compliance costs across multiple jurisdictions, for sales teams and trade relationships, for after-sales infrastructure in territories where Genpower currently has no presence. Every pound deployed internationally is a pound that is not addressing the gross margin compression that is making the UK core business barely break even at the operating level.
The risk is the classic growth trap: a company with an insufficiently profitable domestic base attempting to fund international expansion from debt and asset disposals rather than free cash flow. If the UK operation cannot consistently generate the margins it achieved as recently as two years ago, the JCB global ambition becomes a liability rather than an opportunity – a vast overhead on top of an already stressed balance sheet.
The company has, to be fair, shown awareness of this tension. The decision to move international activities into a separate group entity limits the direct balance sheet exposure of the UK trading company. And the new supply chain finance facility, coming on stream in mid-2026, is designed precisely to fund the working capital demands of international stock pipelines without depleting operating cash.
But that facility is itself debt – US$4.75m of it. A business that has just spent 18 months reducing net debt from £10.87m to £3.09m would be wise to consider carefully how much new debt it takes on in pursuit of global ambitions, before the UK margin has demonstrably recovered.
The auditors’ verdict: not going anywhere
The one unambiguously reassuring element of these accounts comes from Evens & Co, the Milford Haven-based firm that audited the financials and signed off on 25 June 2026.
On the question of going concern – the central test of whether a business can continue to operate – the auditors concluded that they had not identified any material uncertainties that might cast significant doubt on Genpower’s ability to continue for at least the next 12 months. That is as clean a bill of health as an auditor can give.
The directors themselves express a reasonable expectation that the company has adequate resources to continue operational existence for the foreseeable future. Budget and cash flow forecasts, they say, support this conclusion.
Genpower is not about to fail. The JCB and Hyundai relationships remain intact. The company is actively trading, continues to carry meaningful stock, and has a loyal dealer network built over nearly two decades. Its debt position, while still carrying a punishing interest rate, is now manageable in a way it was not 18 months ago.
The real question these accounts leave unanswered
The filed accounts for this period tell the story of a business that grew fast, made an acquisition that failed, sold its own building to clear its debts, and is now betting that a worldwide JCB licence will justify everything.
What they cannot tell us – what only the next set of accounts will reveal – is whether gross margin is recovering. Whether the UK and Ireland operation, refocused and releveraged, is generating the cash that the international expansion programme demands. Whether the family founders’ restructuring into a Topco has attracted the capital partner, or the trade buyer, or the refinancing terms that the structure appears designed to enable.
Genpower has spent two decades building a business from a Pembrokeshire transport yard into a nationally significant power equipment distributor. It holds licence relationships that most distribution businesses spend years trying to secure. It has a workforce, a warehouse network, and a logistics infrastructure that would be difficult to replicate.
The accounts show a company under genuine financial pressure – but also one that has taken substantive steps to address it. The building has been sold. The debts have been cut. The group has been restructured. A new lender has committed.
Whether all of that is enough depends on a single question the accounts politely decline to answer: what is happening to gross margin?
Until that number starts moving back toward 27%, everything else is noise.
Genpower Ltd is registered in England and Wales under company number 05758983. Its financial statements for the period 1 April 2024 to 30 September 2025 were filed at Companies House on 26 June 2026 and signed on behalf of the board by director Mr R G Morgan.
Max Letek is a writer at Garden-Review and Marketing Consultant at Media-M.
