Prebur UK: from import broker to stock on the floor

The verdict in one page

Stock on the floor is the right call. The UK pays well for every category in the Airtech range once each product is benchmarked against its true like-for-like competitor — and almost nothing is sold from stock, which is the opening.

1Place

Where Prebur UK sells, how big the demand is, and what it costs to reach it.

The geography is already right

Warren is at Uckfield, East Sussex (TN22). That sits inside the densest facilities-management corridor in the UK. The benchmark invoices reviewed for this plan run between two businesses within thirty miles of him: the supplier Dustop Ltd at Broadbridge Heath, West Sussex, and the buyer Muneris Ltd at Caterham, Surrey — who then had filters delivered to sites in London, Coventry, Peterborough, Bedford, Newark, Reigate, Sittingbourne and Bexhill.

That is the shape of the business: a South East base serving a national multi-site contract. Uckfield is roughly two hours from Felixstowe and inside the M25 catchment for next-day pallet networks.

Demand: 15–25× South Africa

Channel plan and budget

Paid budget deliberately starts below the £3 000/month "moderate" scenario in the June 2026 keyword report. With one container of stock, the constraint is inventory depth, not traffic. Spend up only once repeat ordering proves out.

2Product

How the Airtech range maps onto UK sizes, grades and standards — and what to settle with the factory before the order is placed.

Depth is fine. Face dimension needs one email.

The Airtech panel is marketed as 48 mm but is actually 46 mm — a nominal figure carried for the South African market. The UK standard depth is 45 mm, and UK slots accept 45–48 mm, so 46 mm drops straight in. Depth is a non-issue.

The face dimension is the one that matters, because a rigid metal frame 3 mm oversize simply will not enter the slot. And here the UK convention is precise: 592 × 592 for metal and plastic frames, 595 × 595 for card frames — the 3 mm is the frame construction allowance. Filters Direct's own catalogue shows it cleanly: their card range is built on 595 / 594 / 494 / 394, their metal range on 592 / 492 / 392 / 287.

The half-panel is the outlier regardless of how the nominal question resolves: the UK 24 × 12" is 287 wide, not 295, and Dustop invoiced that size four times in the sample. Specify 592 × 287 for the UK.

Grades: the F7 problem

This is the most consequential finding in the plan. Across twelve invoices covering nine sites and roughly £2 400 of filters, every single secondary filter was F7. Not one F9.

F9 is not "better" in the buyer's eyes — it is a different part number with a higher pressure drop and a higher whole-life energy cost. An FM replacing an F7 will not accept an F9 substitute without a specification change they have no authority to make. Request F7 / ePM1 55% media variants of the 592 × 592 × 600 pocket, the 592 × 592 × 330 pocket and the 592 × 592 × 292 rigid before the order goes in.

The honest weakness: pressure drop

The Airtech G4 panel is rated at 105 Pa initial resistance at 3 400 m³/h. The UK energy-optimised metal panel (Filters Direct VP4, £28,97) is rated at 45 Pa at a comparable face velocity. That 60 Pa gap is real and it is not trivial:

Two things keep this manageable. First, the £26,34 standard metal-cased panel does not publish a resistance figure and is very unlikely to be a 45 Pa product — that is the comparator to sell against, not the VP4. Second, this is a media specification, not a design flaw: ask the factory what a lower-loft, lower-ΔP media costs. A G4 at 60–70 Pa would make the UK panel proposition materially stronger and is worth a small FOB premium.

Until that is answered, do not market the Airtech panel on energy. Market it on availability, frame quality and price.

Standards: EN 779 is dead, ISO 16890 is the language

ISO 16890 replaced EN 779 as the mandatory classification basis on 30 June 2018. UK tender documents, NHS estates schedules and CIBSE-aligned specifications are all written in ePM1 / ePM2,5 / ePM10. Prebur's site, datasheets and product copy still lead with "EN779:2012". In South Africa that is unremarkable; in the UK it signals a supplier who has not kept up.

3Price

What the UK actually pays, from twelve real trade invoices and six online suppliers — and where Prebur can sit.

The UK panel market is two markets

This is where Revision A went wrong, and it is worth showing the working because the same trap applies to every category. Filters Direct sells both frame types from the same catalogue, so the comparison is clean — same supplier, same size, same page structure:

Filters Direct is not simply an expensive retailer — their card-frame 24 × 24 at £5,80 sits within pennies of ADD Filtration's £5,50. They are market-priced on card. The 4,5× uplift is what a metal frame is genuinely worth in the UK.

The benchmark: what one contractor really paid

Dustop Ltd invoiced Muneris Ltd twelve times between 29 September and 24 November 2025, ex VAT, net 30 days, £19,00 carriage per delivery. These are contractor trade prices, not list. Dustop describes its panels as "disposable pleated", which is the card-frame product — so £9,26 is what a contractor pays for a card panel that retails online at £5,80.

The rest of the online market

Where Prebur UK should sit

Warren buys at landed cost and adds his own margin, so these are worked as landed + markup with nothing hidden. Two published tiers, both ex VAT: a trade price for account customers and a list price for one-off online and telephone orders. Every figure is checked against the cheapest credible like-for-like competitor before it is checked against cost.

Markup is on cost, consistent with Prebur's convention. VAT is added at 20% on top of every figure above. Panel trade prices sit 41% below the UK metal-cased equivalent while still doubling money — that gap is the room to negotiate with a contract account.

4Supply

What a container costs to land in Uckfield instead of Silverton, using the same FOB prices from the same factory.

Duty and VAT: confirmed, not assumed

• Zero duty on finished filters from China. No anti-dumping or safeguard measure applies to these codes. Same outcome as South Africa.
• Import VAT at 20% is reclaimable once Prebur UK is VAT registered. Use Postponed VAT Accounting so the VAT is declared and reclaimed on the same return and never leaves the bank account — otherwise about £6 450 is tied up for a quarter.
• Filter media on the roll is the exception — felt attracts 6%. If roll stock is added later, classify it carefully.

Landed cost model

Same method as the SA container calculator: fixed transport is converted to a rate per cubic metre and allocated by volume; insurance is a percentage of FOB. Duty is zero, so it drops out.

Terms and cash

• Payment to factory: 30% deposit, 70% before shipment — unchanged from SA. On $35 934 that is $10 780 now and $25 154 in roughly 30 days.
• Trade terms to offer: Dustop runs net 30. Match it for account customers, pro-forma or card for new accounts. Consider GoCardless direct debit for repeat schedules.
• Insurance: 0,5% of FOB, marine all-risks, included in the model.
• Transit: allow 35–45 days port to port. Carriers are still routing via the Cape rather than Suez, adding 10–14 days. Order now for a Q4 arrival.

5The first container

One 40 ft high cube, filled to 67 CBM, weighted to where the margin actually is.

Where the money is made

Every category now clears 55% markup. The container is balanced rather than carried by two lines, which matters for a first order where nobody knows yet which SKUs will actually move.

6Site and channel

What prebur.co.uk is today, what it needs to become, and whether to clone the SA site or connect the two.

What is live right now

• prebur.co.uk resolves and returns HTTP 200. It is a React single-page app served from a third-party AI site builder (vibe.filesafe.space), last modified 23 June 2026 — not the Astro codebase, and not on the prebur-uk Cloudflare Pages project, which is currently erroring (522).
• Contact details are already Warren's: 26 Selby Road, Uckfield, TN22 5EB, sales@prebur.co.uk, 07544 110170.
• Structure is sound: Products (panel, pocket, HEPA, grease), Sectors (data centres, NHS, pharmaceutical, industrial), Tools, About, Contact. No prices, no stock, no checkout.
• The page is client-rendered with an empty HTML shell — 1 641 bytes with no body content. Search engines and AI crawlers that do not execute JavaScript see nothing but a title tag. For a site whose entire purpose is to be found for "AHU filter supplier", that is a structural problem, not a cosmetic one.

Clone or connect?

Take option C. The UK range is not a translation of the SA range — different sizes, different grades, different currency, different standards — so the difference has to live in data regardless. Building that data layer once is cheaper than maintaining two divergent forks, and it is the only option that lets a UK price change ship without touching the SA site.

Payments: no Yoco in the UK

Do not build a checkout for launch. Publish prices and live stock, take the order by phone or form, send a Stripe payment link or invoice on net 30. Once the first container is half sold and VAT registration is in place, port the existing cart and Worker to Stripe. The SA e-commerce build took months; the UK does not need to repeat that before it has customers.

Marketing collateral

Warren gets the full Airtech asset set rebadged with the Uckfield address and his 07544 number: business cards, the datasheet template, the company profile, product photography from the Garick shoot, and the ad banner set. Two rules carry over unchanged — no customer names without approval, and no despatch promises the warehouse cannot keep. One rule is new: every datasheet and every price list goes out in ISO 16890 language, not EN 779.

Sceptic pass

What was challenged after the first draft, what changed, and what is still resting on an assumption.

Still resting on assumptions

• F7 media is priced at the same FOB as F9. The whole pocket-bag margin rests on this. Unconfirmed until E2W quotes.
• The metal-cased panel segment is large enough to absorb 960 panels. Card frame is the volume product in routine servicing. If metal demand is thin, panel stock turns slowly — it will not lose money, but the cash sits.
• Buyers accept aluminium in place of galvanised steel. Defensible on merit, but some specifications name galvanised explicitly.
• Filters Direct's metal prices are transacted, not aspirational. One supplier's published list. A second metal-frame quote would firm this up — Bespoke Filters showed £7,60 as a base price but was sold out and gave no 24 × 24 figure.
• UK arrival costs of £1 495. Built from published port tariffs and typical forwarder ranges, not a quote against this shipment.
• Trade prices assume Warren buys at landed cost. If the deal is consignment or an intercompany sale at a transfer price, the whole ladder shifts.

What happens next

Open commercial questions

• Is Prebur UK a separate company or a Prebur Enterprises branch? Determines VAT, transfer pricing between SA and UK, and whether the container is an intercompany sale or a direct import by Warren.
• Who owns the stock? Consignment (Prebur funds it, Warren sells it) versus Warren buying the container outright changes the price ladder entirely — the trade prices above assume Warren buys at landed cost and adds his own margin.
• Warehouse. 67 CBM needs roughly 60–80 m² with racking. Is that arranged in Uckfield?
• DW/172 for the baffle filters. UK kitchen extract has its own specification; confirm the SS430 baffle satisfies it before marketing to commercial kitchens.