Not quite 'coals to Newcastle', but supplying home engineered and manufactured goods from the UK to China usually happens the other way around these days.

Don Whitley Scientific (DWS) reports the despatch of 21 Minimacs to a customer in China. The order was obtained by a new distributor working with DWS for the first time, Hua Yue Enterprise Holdings, and took two whole years to come to fruition. Sales director Steve Robertson commented: 'The Minimacs has been a very popular product and I am now extremely happy to confirm that this has been the fastest selling product in the whole of our Macs range of workstations'.

The Minimacs was developed initially to fulfill a need for anaerobic and microaerophilic workstations for laboratories where space is limited or quantities processed could not justify the purchase of a larger capacity unit.

The R+D team at DWS managed to develop the unit with an impressive 33% more capacity than any other unit of comparable size.

When used solely as an incubator, as many as 400 90mm petri dishes can be accommodated.

This order marks a particular milestone in the history of DWS as it is the largest single order for Macs workstations that it has ever received.