‘Scaling Up’: Plaid Cymru sets ambitious new targets for Welsh economy
“We should want more Welsh firms to succeed, to grow and to compete on the world stage” – that will be the message from Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy Adam Price as he addressed the Plaid Cymru conference today.
Setting out ambitious new targets for five hundred high growth firms within ten years alongside an additional FTSE 100 company in Wales, Adam Price MS will also launch a new programme ‘Sbardun’ to support Welsh firms ‘with the ambition and potential to become medium-sized companies.’
Addressing the party’s first conference since forming the new Welsh Government in May, Adam Price MS is expected to say:
“Scale matters. We should want more Welsh firms to succeed, to grow and to compete on the world stage. But scale is a means, not an end. The end is good jobs everywhere.
“Because success is not measured simply by the number of companies that reach the summit. It is measured by whether people in every part of Wales can build a good life through good work.
“Our ambition is an economy deep enough, broad enough and rooted enough to create opportunity for all, generation after generation.
“Across Wales, there are thousands of firms capable of helping us build that future.
“And that is why today I am announcing a new programme: Sbardun.
“Sbardun means a spur. It also means an accelerator. Applications open this autumn.
“From April, our first twenty Welsh firms with the ambition and potential to become medium-sized companies will enter an intensive two-year programme.
“Development Bank investment. An entrepreneur who has made the journey before. A peer group of nineteen others making it alongside them. And one joined-up plan for everything holding that company back.
“Money and experience together.
“Twenty is a start. We will learn what works. And what works for twenty, the new agency will take to scale.
“Because the purpose of Sbardun is not to back a handful of firms. It is to change the trajectory of the Welsh economy.
“A target is a promise with a number on it. So here are ours.
“Within ten years five hundred high growth firms. That gets us up to the same level of firm density by population as the UK.
“If we do that, we will create the conditions for an additional FTSE 100 company here in Wales.
“These are not separate ambitions. They are one climb.
“A summit needs a mountain beneath it. The five hundred are that mountain. More firms going from small to medium. More going from medium to large. And from that deeper base, more Welsh companies capable of reaching the summit.”