Businessman John Weatherill is to become a triple millionaire with the flotation of his Pocklington-based mobile phone company.

Booming JWE Telecom will join the stock exchange this spring, making an estimated £3 million for the chairman and joint managing director.

Mr Weatherill told today how he founded the firm 15 years ago with four employees, to supply TV components.

In 1986, he realised the future was mobile and moved into the field of mobile communications.

The company has grown rapidly in recent years, taking advantage of a massive increase in mobile phone ownership in Britain by private users.

The number of subscribers has risen from just over one million in 1990 to 8.3 million by the end of last year.

Mr Weatherill, who lives in the Pickering area, says the day will come when ordinary people carry a mobile in the way they currently use a landline phone.

But his firm, one of the businesses featured some years ago in the series of Evening Press articles about "doom-busters" who were beating the recession, has had to fight for its share of the business in a very competitive market.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.