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03 Sep 2025
Administrators explore options to sell business and key assets as the UK firm ceases trading.
Administrators acting on behalf of the insolvent Glasgow, UK, company M Squared Lasers Ltd. have urged interested parties to contact them quickly, as they explore options to sell the business and its key assets, including intellectual property.
M Squared, which was founded nearly 20 years ago by former Coherent Scotland senior managers Graeme Malcolm and Gareth Maker, ceased trading in late August after running short of cash needed to meet its financial obligations.
Interpath, the London-headquartered restructuring specialist that has been appointed to oversee that sale, said that the laser company had been hit by declining orders and scarcity of key components in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Amidst these challenges, [M Squared] and its directors undertook extensive efforts to explore alternative funding options in order that a projected business turnaround could be achieved,” Interpath announced in its August 27 release.
“However, with these efforts ultimately proving unsuccessful, and owing to a lack of cash to meet its financial obligations, the company’s board concluded it had no option but to seek the appointment of administrators.”
Component shortage
At the time it ceased trading, M Squared Lasers employed 28 people - all of whom have been made redundant. It is understood that the company’s parent firm, M Squared Technologies Group, remains active for now - as well as various subsidiaries, including office operations in the US and Germany.
While the latest annual accounts for both M Squared Lasers and its parent firm are now more than six months overdue, the most recent available figures - for the year ending February 2023 - showed a pre-tax profit of £1.9 million on sales of £17.8 million.
In those accounts, CEO Malcolm and colleagues reported that the company’s order book had expanded across all business segments, notably in the area of quantum technology - where M Squared’s ultra-stable tunable sources have proved particularly popular.
However, they also pointed out that increased defense industry activity in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine had hampered efforts to source some key components, and their ability to hire skilled employees.
The accounts also show that the M Squared Lasers was employing around 70 people at the time, although that total had dropped from around 100 in the previous year.
Debt and equity finance
Meanwhile the parent company’s accounts, covering the same time period, showed a net loss of £6.3 million, compared with a net loss of £7.8 million in the prior year.
The same report also showed that the group company’s cash and equivalent holdings stood at just over £180,000 on February 28, 2023, down from £2.4 million a year earlier.
Among M Squared’s key financial backers were Santander bank, which agreed a debt refinancing deal worth £20 million in November 2020, and the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) - which at the same time provided £12.5 million in equity funding that also represented its first ever investment.
Further filings indicate that SNIB had since invested another £7.7 million in equity funding in September 2023, and provided £2 million in loan notes in December 2024. Some media reports have suggested that total SNIB support amounted to around £34 million.
M Squared’s most recent accounts also show that director “emoluments” - payments to the company’s senior team - totalled £2.36 million for the year ending February 2023, with the highest-paid director receiving £915,000 and both figures up sharply since the 2020 refinancing deal.
Taxpayers face losing all of the £34 million loaned to M Squared Lasers by the Scottish National Investment Bank after the company called in administrators https://t.co/A2C44xBQbs
— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) August 28, 2025
Prized assets
In Interpath’s release its managing director Geoff Jacobs, now Joint Administrator of M Squared Lasers Limited, described the company as a groundbreaking and award-winning technology business, which had served scientists, universities, and a wide-range of private-sector customers for 20 years.
Among those accolades was a short-listing for the UK Royal Academy of Engineering's prestigious MacRobert Award in 2019 in recognition of the firm's tunable "SolsTiS" Ti:sapphire laser. It has been deployed by hundreds of customers and played a key role in a variety of applications – including calibration of the "Tropomi" imaging spectrometer on board the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 5P Earth imaging satellite.
In recent years M Squared also diversified into quantum systems, including a quantum gravimeter for sensing local gravitational acceleration that the company launched at the 2022 UK Quantum Technology Showcase in London, and its "Maxwell" quantum computing platform at the same event in 2023.
“Amongst other significant and innovative achievements, the company has created a laser platform which is scalable, compact and robust, and which is contributing to studies in quantum technologies around the world,” Jacobs added.
“We are now rapidly exploring options to sell the business and its prized assets, including the company’s highly specialised intellectual property, and encourage any interested parties to contact us quickly.”
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