“Export or die”, said a character in the 1959 film I m Alright Jack, starring Peter Sellers as the moth-eaten old shop steward.

And this year’s crop of Oxfordshire Queen’s Awards for Enterprise — which themselves date back to today 55 years ago (the Queen’s birthday in 1966) — show entrepreneurs here are pulling their weight when it comes to helping the old national balance of payments along.

Of the seven awards won by Oxfordshire organisations, five are for international trade — with one of the remaining two being won for innovation and the other for sustainable development.

And when it comes to export it seems that sometimes the old ideas are the best.

For instance, Allmakes 4x4, which employs 105 people at its Milton Park headquarters, has emerged as a prize winner.

It supplies spare parts to customers in more than 90 countries for that venerable icon of good British design, the Land Rover.

It has more than doubled its overseas earnings during the last three years, achieving export sales over that time to more than £36m and in the process creating 22 more jobs.

Mike Hands described how the company was founded in a room the size of a Land Rover Discovery in the Wolvercote home of his father, Peter, in 1976 — and has burgeoned from there.

He said: “My father was a former British Leyland employee who loved Land Rover, saw an opportunity and seized it together with fellow founder Terry Chipperfield.

“British Leyland itself was undergoing huge changes at that time.”

He added: “The great thing about Land Rovers is they are largely the same shape as they were in 1984 and they are easy to strip down and put together again. And that makes them popular everywhere.

“They have certainly provided us with quite a ride over the years, and, of course, it is wonderful for all of us to achieve this award again. We won one for export back in 1991.”

Another Milton Park company on the winners’ list is Crystalox.

It has been making multi-crystalline silicon ingots since 1982 but has increased its export earnings over the past three years by 74 per cent to £157m.

It ships ingots to Japan and Germany for processing into silicon wafers for use by many of the world’s leading solar cell companies; but now it is forging ahead with new markets in China, Taiwan, and the United States.

Company secretary Matthew Wethey said: “This is the fourth time we have been selected. We won in 1990, 1999, and 2003 — but they only last six years and we didn’t like having to take the logo off our letterhead last year. So we entered again and won again. Everyone here loves receiving official recognition for doing well.”

Another winner connected with photovoltaic cells, again in the international trade division of the awards, is OpTek Systems, founded in 2000, which employs 18 people at Abingdon Business Park and another eight in the US.

It makes laser systems for micro-engineering, for processing optical fibres used in telecom and data com and for PV cells. Now it has increased export sales to almost 80 per cent of its production in the last three years — expanding its area of sales into new markets including China and Korea.

Head of business development Gideon Foster-Turner said: “Historically our sales were in North America but now the balance is shifting to Asia.”

Another first-time winner is Media Analytics, which has headquarters at the Jam Factory, Oxford, and employs 40 people.

It publishes a magazine called Global Water Intelligence (along with website globalwaterintel.com) which reaches customers in 62 countries who are interested in all aspects of water — an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world.

The company, founded in 2002, has grown its overseas sales by 800 per cent over six years. Export sales in that period totalled £7m — but with £3.5m of that achieved last year alone.

Finance director Andrew Ferry said: “People are waking up to the fact that there are water shortages in many places.

“We also organise conferences overseas which are well attended. Oxford is the ideal place for a business like ours because of the expertise here, for example at Oxford University. which runs a water course.”

Chinnor company FlavorActiV, founded in 1996, is a winner for the third time. It won an international trade award in 2005, and an innovation award in 2007. It provides training services and quality control products to help brewers worldwide ensure that their beers taste consistently the same — and live up to drinkers’ expectations. The company, with 14 employees, has quadrupled its export sales in six years to £2m a year.

Richard Boughton, FlavorActiV’s managing director, said: “In any pub or bar you walk into, in any part of the world, the likelihood is that at least one of its beers has been tasted by a FlavorActiV trained taster.”

Seacourt, the world’s first zero-waste to landfill printer, based in Pony Road, Oxford, has carried off a sustainable development award — for the second time in four years.

Jim Dinnage, chairman of the company which employs 19 people, said: “We won one award back in 1968 as well. But to win three in one lifetime has made my working career. Going to Buckingham Palace for the party is one of the best bits.”

He added: “We have not had a waste bin outside this place since October 2009 — which shows it can be done.”

The only winner in the innovation section in Oxfordshire this year was Tessella of Abingdon Science Park, which has taken the prize together with The National Archives in London for inventing a system, called the Safety Deposit Box, to preserve digital information for posterity. Julian Fowler, head of marketing at the firm which employs 210 people and is now recruiting more, said: “The problem is that technology moves so fast that after a few years it is difficult, if not impossible, to read data.

“The classic example is the Domesday project for the BBC’s programme in the 1980s. They put a time capsule program in a hole, but when they thought they would dig it up again it was all but impossible to read. Luckily a collector was found who still had some old equipment.”

The new system verifies what is called data migration to ensure records always retain meaning.

And as if that were not enough awards for one county, a Queen’s Award for enterprise promotion has gone to Victoria Lennox, former president of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Europe's largest student-led