Kreston Technology Business Barometer

Following on from the success of our annual national survey of technology based businesses and their owners, we launch the results of the first of a series of brief surveys intended to track changes throughout the year in perceptions of the key issues affecting technology based businesses. Each quarter the survey will look to assess confidence in the key areas of funding, sales and general sector confidence whilst exploring a number of more topical areas affecting the sector.

Funding

Not unsurprisingly, access to funding for the sector on the whole has remained the same over the course of the year with just over one third of those surveyed noticing an improvement in the ability to raise funds.

Overseas sales

With the Government driving export as a key method to ensure UK economic growth, it is encouraging that the technology sector seems to be benefiting with just over half of the businesses that export indicating an increase in international sales over the course of the last 12 months.

Sector performance

As with the rest of the UK, confidence does seem to be returning to the sector, with over three quarters of the businesses surveyed reporting an improvement in business performance over the course of the last year. Although economy is still fragile, we are interested to see whether this trend continues over the coming year.

 Skills and Patent Box

There was good news and bad news evident in the sector from the responses to these two questions. The good news is that those surveyed seemed to indicate that they didn’t have a problem finding the right skills to enable them to successfully run and grow their businesses, although the responses indicated that the skills most difficult to acquire were those held by programmers and software developers. The bad news is that the benefits of Patent Box, the new tax regime launched by the Government last year, is not making the impact in the sector that they would hope.

In summary, there do seem to be encouraging signs and the confidence in the sector has steadily improved over the course of the year. As the first Barometer this is our benchmark and we look forward to being able to track confidence and performance over the course of the next 12 months.