Who Has Built a New Manufacturing Firm Worth 1Bn in the UK in Their Own Lifetime?

Who has built a new manufacturing firm worth £1bn in the UK in their own lifetime?

Is it only six people?In late February 2016 Sir James Dyson announced he would ‘dramatically expand its UK activities tenfold’ by building a £2.5bn centre to develop new battery technologies and robotics. The workforce will double to 3,500 over the next few years.

The new facility in Hullavington, Wiltshire will, hopefully, not build the driverless electric car - as rumour would have it – but create a centre of advanced power engineering - a key sector of the UK economy. Dyson, a prominent supporter of Brexit before the referendum in June, rightfully stated that the depreciation of the Pound was far more important to manufacturers than any tariffs imposed by EU nations in future.

His firm now sells a growing array of bladeless fans, air purifiers, hand-dryers, hairdryers and robotic vacuum cleaners. He said “We have got the opportunity to export globally – Europe is only 15% of global trade, and declining.”

Britain, he added, was a “great place to do business due to the low rate of corporation tax, the skills of engineers and scientists, and the decline in the value of the Pound against the Dollar and Euro. These are far more important elements than any World Trade Organisation tariffs.”

Dyson reported revenues of £1.7bn in 2015, up 26% year on year, with profits of £448m. It is investing £7m a week in R&D, especially in the all-important ‘D’, development, which not enough mid-sized firms do.. Dyson himself still owns 100% of the company and is estimated to be worth £5bn – about 10 times more than Sir Richard Branson.

Dyson is one of only a tiny handful of people who have created a UK manufacturing firm worth £1bn in his own lifetime. Other members of this, the most exclusive of clubs are Ron Dennis of supercar maker McLaren, Sir David McMurtry and John Deer, co-founders of manufacturing engineering firm Renishaw plc. Jim Ratcliffe at Ineos, who mostly took over existing oil & gas assets, may not count. Apologies to those omitted.

While these warlords continue to lead British engineering the Dept of Business should act fast to defend what is left of light manufacturing – by protecting their premises from foreign-owned housing developers, ultra low-cost goods imported from China, from the UK’s large if covert £3-an-hour textile plants, sited in the grim parts of east London, Bradford and Leicester. There are now around 30,000 unlicensed online businesses selling imported electronic components from the Far East – the majority just one-man bands, busily shrinking Britain’s embattled electronics manufacturing sector.