Data provided by the most recent annual survey from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) reveal that the UK economy which is worth around 2.1 trillion GBP, is already bigger than France’s by 3.6 per cent. 

According to Douglas McWilliams, deputy chairman of CEBR: “Tech is the dynamic factor in economic growth and Britain is investing more in this area than France and Germany put together (…) Between half and three-quarters of UK economic growth has come from the tech sector.”

If the World Economic League Table figures are to be believed, the UK currently has the world’s fifth-largest economy with a gross domestic product of exceeding 36.000 GBP per head of population.

“We are expecting that tech will be the big winner over the coming years,” Karl Thompson, an economist at the CEBR told the Conservative Post.

“We have identified nine sectors of tech where the skill requirements are likely to increase by more than 100 per cent by 2031, led by Artificial Intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, robotics and medical tech, all of which are likely to need an increase in demand of more than 300 per cent” – he added.

Another sector in which the UK is experiencing a flourishing development is that of startups. As a matter of fact, British startups and scale-ups raised 29.4 billion GBP. It is two times more than Germany (14.7 billion GBP) and almost three times more than France companies (9.7 billion GBP).

Furthermore, UK tech investment accounted for a third of the total 89.5 billion GBP that flowed into the European tech ecosystem in 2021. Most of the money coming into UK tech comes from the United States, with 37 per cent of all funding.

Over 28 per cent of British venture funding came from domestic capital. Competition for deals among VC funds is heating up as more and more American venture funds launch their offices on the UK soil, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. 

A higher number of funding corresponds to an increase in the number of so-called unicorns. Unicorn is a term commonly used for companies valued at over 1 billion USD. In Great Britain, as many as 29 such unicorns have been created in 2021. In other words, 25 per cent of the UK’s total unicorns were created in the last year alone. This takes the UK’s total unicorn figure to 115 which is more than the number of unicorns in Germany (56) and France combined (31). 

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen

Photo: Unsplash