Archive Partners tracks twenty companies in each of 47 counties and scores every one against the same digital confidence framework. Our County Spotlight series has so far covered Cumbria, the Isle of Wight, Herefordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, the five highest-scoring counties. This week we move to the sixth: Cheshire.
Cheshire’s twenty tracked companies average 0.360, comfortably above the 0.311 average across the whole dataset. Together they report £475.6m of turnover, from Massey Bros LLP at £91.1m down to The F.A. Bartlett Tree Expert Company at £10.4m.
Verified firms score nearly twice as high
Five Cheshire companies carry a Verified status: R.& B.Star (Electrical Wholesalers), Shawton Engineering, P J Livesey Homes (4), Himoinsa Power Solutions and A J Field Electrical. They average 0.56. The other fifteen are still Verification Pending and average 0.29.
The verified group is small in money terms. It accounts for £76.6m, or about 16% of the county’s tracked turnover. As in Norfolk, the confidence in the headline average comes from the smaller firms.
The biggest names score lowest
Cheshire’s three largest companies by turnover are Massey Bros LLP (£91.1m, 0.35), Claremont Group Interiors (£65.8m, 0.27) and Yokogawa United Kingdom (£41.0m, 0.08). Between them they hold £198.0m, about 42% of the county total, and average only 0.23.
Yokogawa’s 0.08 is the most striking number. It is a long-established industrial instrumentation business, incorporated in 1986, yet it leaves almost no public trail for a scoring model to confirm. Amtrex International, a £20.7m wholesaler, scores a flat 0.00.
Construction does the heavy lifting
What lifts the county is its building trade. Seven of the twenty companies have a primary SIC code in construction (divisions 41 to 43), and they average 0.42, the best of any sector group in the county. They include Shawton Engineering (0.64), P J Livesey Homes (4) (0.47), A J Field Electrical (0.44) and Boccard UK (0.39).
Compare that with the other two clusters:
- Wholesale (4 companies): average 0.31, with Himoinsa at 0.48 and Amtrex at 0.00.
- Manufacturing (4 companies): average 0.24, including Yokogawa, Interket, UK Point of Sale Group and Material Applications.
Construction firms sell on reputation and have to show accreditations, safety records and project histories to win work, so they tend to leave a consistent public footprint. Specialist manufacturers often sell through a few long-standing relationships and have little reason to.
What it signals
Three points stand out for anyone using Cheshire data:
- Scale and visibility are unrelated. The three largest firms sit below the county average, so size alone is a poor guide to how much can be independently confirmed.
- Sector is a stronger predictor than age. Material Applications dates from 1956 and scores 0.39, while P J Livesey Homes (4), incorporated in 2020, scores 0.47.
- Verification is the lever. Moving even a few of the pending majority across would raise the county average faster than any other change.
Filing dates worth noting
Yokogawa United Kingdom, A J Field Holdings and A J Field Electrical all show accounts due on 31 December 2026. Upstream Mobile Commerce (28 September) and R.& B.Star (30 September) have recorded due dates that have just passed, so fresh filings may already be on the register. Check Companies House for the latest position before relying on any date.
You can browse all twenty on the Cheshire county page, look at the R.& B.Star profile, the highest-scoring company in the county, or compare other areas through the regions index.