British High Commissioner to Singapore
Thank you for your interest in joining this UK-Singapore Innovation Partnership series, a new initiative delivered through the UK’s Asia Pacific Digital Trade Network.
One of the aims of the Digital Trade Network is to increase digital tech trade and investment opportunities between our countries, and to forge new international partnerships and collaborations. We hope this series of events will do exactly that.
There is no doubt that digital technology is more important than ever – particularly since the emergence of COVID-19 – with its ability to deliver innovations that can improve people’s lives and make businesses more productive.
Identifying opportunities for our innovation organisations and businesses to work together to commercialise and deploy new digital tech solutions will help ensure we can all benefit from the best that digital innovation can offer.
The UK continues to demonstrate its strength in creating and scaling successful innovative tech businesses. In 2020, we saw seven new unicorns - private companies valued at $1 billion or more – created, bringing the total up to 80. The UK also has 136 potential unicorns – companies with a value of $250m to $800m. This is more than twice as many as Germany and France, the countries with the next largest pipeline of future unicorns. In 2020, the UK exceeded the previous year’s record VC investment, again outperforming every other country in Europe, and attracting more than $15 billion worth of investment according to Dealroom - more than Germany and France combined ($14.5bn).
I know these businesses are excited about exploring the opportunities to work with Singapore and the wider region, and some are already doing so via Tech Nation, the UK’s scale up experts and also part of our new Digital Trade Network. This Innovation Partnership series creates another avenue to explore future collaborations.
As forward-looking and digitally advanced economies, sharing a strategic commitment to global trade and the free flow of capital and investments, the UK and Singapore already enjoy broad-based collaboration in science and technology. I look forward to seeing how this new UK-Innovation Partnership series can deepen this relationship even further.
