Avon Technologies plc

Avon Technologies is what remains after a 140-year-old British rubber company deliberately narrowed itself down to life-critical protective equipment. The business began in 1885 with a cloth mill on the Avon at Melksham, Wiltshire, moved into rubber goods, and listed in London in 1933. It made tyres, conveyor belts and dairy equipment for most of the twentieth century. The tyre business went to Cooper in 1997 and the milking equipment operation to DeLaval in 2020. The company traded as Avon Rubber, then Avon Protection from 2021, and took the Avon Technologies name in August 2024. It sits in the FTSE 250 under the ticker AVON, turned over 313.9 million pounds in 2025 and employs around a thousand people.

The group runs two brands. Avon Protection is the respiratory and CBRN business and has supplied NATO and the US Department of Defense since the 1920s. Its air purifying respirator range is the core: the M50 and M53A1 for US forces, the FM50, FM53 and FM54 for other militaries, the FM12 and FM51 lines, the C50 and PC50 for law enforcement and specialist users, and the HMK150 combined respirator and riot control helmet system. The MITR modular platform, including the MITR-M1 and the MITR-PG1 powered goggle, was designed to sit between a disposable mask and a full-face respirator for lower threat levels. Above those sit powered systems such as EZAir, CS-PAPR and MP-PAPR, and self-contained breathing apparatus in the ST50, ST53 and ST54 families. The company also makes EXOSKIN CBRN suits, boots and gloves, the NH15 escape hood, the Mi-TIC thermal imaging camera range for firefighters, and an underwater line built around the MCM100 rebreather and the CORE intelligent undersuit used by mine countermeasures divers.

Team Wendy is the head protection brand, bought for 130 million dollars in 2020 and combined with the ballistic protection business Avon acquired from 3M the same year. Its EXFIL Ballistic helmet and the lighter EXFIL Ballistic SL are built on ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene shells, and the brand is better known than most for what goes inside the shell: the Zorbium viscoelastic foam liner system and the CAM FIT retention system. The wider helmet catalogue includes the EPIC specialist helmet built on a Ceradyne one-piece ballistic shell, plus the F90, F70 and BA3A series aimed at police and mobile field forces at lower price points.

The one significant retreat was body armour. Avon bought that line from 3M, ran into first article test failures on US Department of Defense plate contracts, and exited, selling the Lexington Kentucky ceramics assets to CoorsTek. Helmets stayed. Team Wendy Ceradyne has since taken delivery orders on the US Army Next Generation Integrated Head Protection System, and on the respiratory side Avon holds a multi-year M53A1 mask contract with the US Army and development work on the ASPIRE hood and mask interface. Aftermarket training and support runs under the AVONPLUS banner.

The useful way to read the company now is as a two-product-family business with an unusually long institutional memory. Filters, face seals and mask fit are hard to get right and harder to qualify against national CBRN standards, which is what keeps the barrier to entry high and the customer list stable across decades. Head protection is a newer and more contested market. The current strategy, which management calls STAR, has been about margin discipline and reliability rather than expansion.