Charles Wace, Chief Executive of the Twofour Group has been awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award for Technology & Communication South Region 2007. The ceremony, hosted by David Mellor, took place at an awards banquet held at the in Hilton Metropole in Birmingham on Monday 25 June.

Charles will now go forward to the UK National Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2007 awards programme held on 1 October 2007 at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Charles beat off stiff competition from software, network, IT and conferencing companies to win the award.

"I was really shocked to win this award" said Charles. "I see it very much as a team effort and a tribute to everyone at Twofour and all the hard work which has gone into making the Group such a success."

Commenting on this year's Entrepreneur Of The Year regional award winners, Derek Harris, the chairman of the independent judging panel and chief executive of Aston Science Park said: "This year's winners displayed true entrepreneurial spirit and through hard work, innovation and determination, have built incredibly successful businesses. Charles' incredible capacity for perceiving changes in the media market, and his clear strategic direction, has taken the company from strength to strength."

The Ernst & Young citation for the award said:

"Charles started Twofour with just £500 in 1987. It is now a major media group producing television programmes for both terrestrial and satellite broadcasters in the UK as as far afield as the US, Canada and Japan. Turnover is now £22m. Innovation has been a key byword for Charles. In 2000 Twofour was one of the few companies developing programmes and the underlying technolgoy to put programmes on the web. Then Charles was ahead of his time as broadband capabilities were not enough to support this innovation. But now they are, it puts Charles and his team in an ideal position to take advantage of all the opportunities this presents."

Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year competition aims to recognize and encourage entrepreneurship around the world, and build a forum for the exchange of ideas not just between entrepreneurs of one country, but also internationally.