Dublin was been chosen as the most desirable place for jobs from London’s financial district, as 135 firms have relocated business to the Irish capital because of Brexit, according to new research.
Think tank New Financial has found firms to favour Dublin over its city-competitors Paris, Luxembourg, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. With Ireland being an English-speaking country, language was obviously a big advantage over many other places.
As firms moved to the Irish capital as a result of Brexit, for convenience of business in the European Union, 102 firms chose Paris, 95 selected Luxembourg, 63 Frankfurt and 48 Amsterdam. Banks have moved or plan to move more than £900bn in assets to the continent, worth around 10 per cent of the entire UK banking system.
Insurance firms and asset managers alone, have transferred more than £100bn, with a third of all asset management firms transferring to Dublin post-Brexit. Sixty per cent of banks favoured Frankfurt and nearly two-thirds of the firms making the move to Amsterdam are trading platforms, exchanges or broking firms.
“The real impact of Brexit is unlikely to fully emerge until the dust finally settles in a few years’ time,” managing director of New Financial and a co-author of the report, William Wright, said.
Wright added that Frankfurt would eventually emerge as the “winner” in terms of assets in the longer term, while Paris could still take Dublin’s position in terms of jobs. The think tank found 7,400 staff moves or local hires following the referendum but expects the numbers to increase in the next few years.
Meanwhile, according to new figures, UK tech companies are now more optimistic about their short-term growth prospects than at any time over the last seven years.
Firms in the rapidly-growing British tech sector reported strong confidence that business activity will bounce back strongly after the latest national lockdown and as Brexit-related uncertainty among clients begins to ease.
As a result, companies expanded employee numbers in the first quarter with the pace of staff hiring the quickest for almost two years, according to KPMG’s quarterly tech monitor. However, it was not all plain sailing for tech firms. Business activity dropped modestly in the first quarter, mainly because of the latest pandemic restrictions.
There was also a slight drop in new orders due to Brexit disruption, while rising costs for staff, transportation and electronic components led to the sharpest increase in input prices for the sector for nearly four years. But as tech companies looked towards future growth, employment rose by its fastest rate since the second quarter of 2019, while output growth projections were at their strongest since the second quarter of 2014.
Optimism was higher than in all other parts of the UK private sector apart from hotels and restaurants, many of which have not been trading at all for the last nine months.
“With the UK now in phase three of the government’s roadmap to recovery and businesses starting to adjust to regulatory changes and supply chain issues after Brexit, the tech sector is fast-tracking plans to get back to growth,” said Bina Mehta, chair of KPMG in the UK.
“An acceleration in jobs growth to its fastest for almost two years provides a clear signal that tech companies are confident about future workloads and expect to receive a boost from improving UK economic prospects.”
Mehta added: “The successful vaccine rollout and optimism around corporate technology investment were key factors helping to drive up business confidence to a seven-year high in the first quarter of the year.” (The writer is our foreign correspondent based in the UK)
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
