KENT Messenger multi-media group, publisher of this website, is among a trio of local companies that have made it into Britain's 100 most profitable enterprises. The Sunday Times Profit Track 100 ranks the group 81st in the listing sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Folkestone-based Saga Leisure, the holiday and financial services company for the over-fifties, is 98th, with Hillreed Holdings, the Maidstone housebuilder, at 100. The league table ranks the UK's unquoted companies by profit growth. KMG achieved profits of £4.8 million in 2000-1 on sales of £35 million. Group profits have grown 30 per cent a year from £2.2 million in 1997 to £4.8 million in 2000.

David Lewis, KMG managing director, said: "The continued improvement in our financial performance is enabling the company to continue its investment programme in our people and strategic development. Our local radio initiative across Kent is a project demanding a significant injection of capital equipment and resources. We are well placed to meet these long-term financial demands on what is now a multi-media operation. Our core newspaper business is proving to be a stable base on which to build new services for businesses and local communities across Kent."

Saga posted profits growth of 24.3 per cent a year from £19.4 million in 1998 to £37.3 million in 2001. Profits at Hillreed Holdings went up 23.per cent a year from £2.8 million in 1998 to £5.2 million in 2001.

Jon Wright, senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Maidstone, said he was delighted to see these Kent companies in the table. "PriceWaterhouseCoopers, through our work with growing, ambitious companies, has seen at first hand how they use innovation and quality customer service to achieve spectacular progress," he said. "The contribution these companies make to the growth of the UK and local economy is vital, particularly to job creation."

The Kent Messenger started in 1859. It now publishes more than 30 newspaper titles and owns five radio stations. The late Sidney de Haan founded Saga Leisure in Folkestone in 1951. Hillreed Holdings builds homes in Kent and Sussex. The three companies made combined profits of £47 million in their latest financial year and together have created more than 670 jobs in the past three years.