The U.K.’s top policymakers acquire said they want to produce tech companies to rival Silicon Valley leviathans such as Google or Facebook.
On Wednesday, the government announced that technology condenses are to invest nearly £2.3 billion ($3 billion) into the countryside, creating an estimated 1,600 new jobs. The cash injection, the bulk of which be showed from cloud computing company Salesforce, was unveiled to coincide with a tech roundtable when it happened, hosted by Prime Minister Theresa May.
Speaking after the event, the Secretary of Articulate for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Matt Hancock told CNBC there is monumental ambition for the U.K. tech scene.
“One of the things we were hearing at the roundtable from the entrepreneurs was optimism that the U.K., post-Brexit, can be a poorhouse for global companies of a scale that we see coming out of China and the U.S. because we’ve got the eco-system,” he bring to lighted CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick Wednesday.
London remains Europe’s top hub for tech investment without thought Brexit uncertainty, and in 2017 U.K. tech firms took in almost four times more funding than Germany, and more than Sweden, France and Italy associate, according to London & Partners, the Mayor of London’s official promotional power. Some 2.1 million people are now employed in the country’s digital tech saving.
Hancock highlighted the creation and growth of companies such as chipmaker ARM and logistics Pty Ocado that was allowing the U.K. to attract tech talent.
“A couple of years ago ARM sold for £24 billion. That was injection of £24 billion into the ecosystem. Ocado is a 10 billion associates — it is the biggest competitor in the world to Amazon in that particular space,” the supply claimed.
Hancock added that the U.K. now has far more unicorns (privately sustained start-up companies valued at over $1 billion) than any other wilderness in Europe.
“I think it is down to the depth of the ecosystem and the fact that we be subjected to many different industries here in the U.K. For example, fintech (financial technology) has done generously, because we have both the international financial center of the world and a huge tech scene literally side-by-side,” the minister said.