Scottish Enterprise seeks more companies of scale to grow Scotland’s economy

That’s the view of Scottish Enterprise, who today hosted an event with some of Scotland’s most ambitious companies to help them identify how to scale up their business and create major new employment and investment opportunities.

Scotland currently lags behind other parts of the UK in terms of the number of large scale companies based here.  Despite having 9% of the UK population, Scotland has just 4% of UK companies with turnover in excess of £100 million.

Crawford Gillies, chairman of Scottish Enterprise said: “The benefits these companies can make to the Scottish economy are substantial.  They often have their global headquarters situated here; they employ the graduates from our universities; and they invest in their wider supply chain, creating more jobs and more revenue for Scotland’s economy.

“Their higher levels of investment and greater sources of innovation mean they can also play a vital role in helping to address Scotland’s productivity levels and overall competitiveness.  However, there are too few of them in Scotland.  If we are to increase our productivity levels to those of the top performing economies in Europe, it’s estimated we need another 68 companies with a turnover of more than £100 million.”

To support this, Scottish Enterprise is looking for new companies to join its intensive Companies of Scale programme, which aims to offer tailored support to help companies achieve rapid growth. 

The programme is aimed at companies which currently have a turnover of more than £15 million but which have the potential to substantially increase their turnover and expand their business over the next three years.

Mr Gillies added: “For companies to achieve real scale, we need to step up our efforts around internationalisation and commercialisation.  These are the two factors which can help companies to become more globally competitive.

“However, we also need to ensure that the business leaders behind these companies have the ambition and drive to help their company achieve their full potential, to be able to identify and take advantage of new opportunities, and to develop new products or new ways of working that can transform their business.” 

To date, Scottish Enterprise’s companies of scale programme has helped 22 companies through intensive, customised support, which has generated an additional £130 million towards the Scottish economy. 

One company which has benefited from the programme is Livingston based Caledonian Alloys (CA), which has been able to increase their turnover from £35 million to £100 million over three years.  The company was one of the very first companies to participate in the programme and since then has gone on to become the world's largest recycler of specialist metals used in the aerospace industry.  The programme helped to introduce the management team to new ideas, benchmarked them against international standards, supported improvements in performance management, international strategy and promoted networking between the companies and through our Global Scot network.

John Wardlaw, managing director of Caledonian Alloys, said: “Despite already being successful, we recognised that in order to continue to achieve such high levels of growth we would need to resolve some of the scaling issues typical of a highly innovative and ambitious company.    Engaging as our strategic partners, Scottish Enterprise’s companies of scale team gave us the external challenge which supported us taking the company to the next level and realising our ambitions.”

More than 70 companies participated in today’s event at the Norton House Hotel in Edinburgh which was hosted by Rene Carayol and guest speakers included Sir Tom Farmer, Brad Rosser, David Smith and Jim McPhillimy.