UK: The Ball’s in our Court - The UK Technology Sector at a Critical Juncture (part 2 of 2)

Financial institutions and the UK technology sector

The UK boasts one of the most vibrant financial markets in the world, which is also one of the largest consumers of technology in the UK. However, its relationship with the UK’s technology sector has suffered since the dotcom crash. Our research suggested a degree of mistrust between the sectors.

This relationship needs to be repaired – with probably more of the initiative coming from the technology sector – whose companies need to improve their ability to express themselves in commercial terms. Deloitte’s view is that an effective partnership between the UK’s financial and technology sectors will allow UK technology companies to become the acquirers, rather than the acquired.

There was also a consensus among respondents that the financial sector should improve its understanding of technology. Conversely, and more importantly, technology companies certainly needed to improve their ability to express themselves in commercial terms. Deloitte’s view is that overcoming this obstacle will require far stronger awareness of the financing options available, as well as longer-established relationships with the financial sector than appear to exist now.

That said, within Europe, the UK’s financial sector is a leading supporter of technology. Eight of the ten most significant technology IPOs executed in Europe since January 2004 have been on London exchanges (see Figure 6) although technology IPO activity and value in the UK pale into insignificance compared with that in the US and China.

The UK’s financial sector comprises a wide range of funding options for the technology sector, each of which works with a varying degree of success. This section evaluates the performance of each:

Small business banking was criticised for both lacking understanding of business fundamentals and technology companies. This has made technology companies increasingly reluctant to use small business functions within retail banks for finance.

Our respondents viewed that the small business banking sector should – if it wishes to attract custom from technology companies – improve staff quality and training. However, given the strength of the UK’s small business banking sector in recent years, Deloitte’s view is that there is more onus on small technology companies improving their communication skills. The small business banking sector cannot be expected to have an expert understanding of technology.

The UK has an active angel and seed funding network, although this is far smaller than its US equivalent, which is blessed by a concentration of billionaires and a history of successes. However the UK’s angel networks could be more effective if they marketed themselves better and had greater geographic scope: they tend to work at a provincial level, rather than focus nationally on a specific technology, sector or category. Our respondents also claimed that the UK’s angels tended to be relatively disinterested in their investments – this differs from the pro-active approach typical of the US. Some respondents suggested that technology entrepreneurs invest a share of their fortunes in developing and nurturing new technology companies, rather than retiring to the south of France.

The UK’s technology sector is the most actively invested in by the European VC community. However our respondents believed that the venture capital’s support of the UK’s technology sector could be even greater if venture capitalists:

• had the required industry expertise to complement their financial skills;

• had more flexible business models, particularly with regard to exit. Presently, template expectations for exit simply do not map against the trajectory of a technology company – particularly early stage companies;

• developed less adversarial relationships with investees;

• our respondents from technology companies felt that venture capital companies provided insufficient support for their investments, focusing unblinkingly on rates of return without doing enough to actively support the company in trying to deliver.

By the same token, those respondents from the venture capital community noted that technology companies found explaining their technology, their business model and their financial projections quite challenging. One respondent attributed this to these companies’ inability to attract – or insensitivity to the need to recruit – quality marketing and finance professionals who could both articulate the selling points and explain the business plan.

The private equity market was considered by most respondents to be strong, but under-exploited by the UK’s technology sector. Most respondents noted an upward trend in terms of the amount of private equity available, and a rise in the upper limit in investment size. Private equity was being considered for a wide range of opportunities, from investments of a few hundred thousand pounds to the acquisition of mobile operators, running into tens of billions of euros. According to our respondents, in common with other areas of the financial services sector, there was a lack of clarity amongst technology companies as to what function private equity funds serve, what stage of funding they typically involve themselves in, what order of magnitude of funding is available and so on.

Deloitte’s view is that rising value of funds available to private equity is testament to their success and the confidence placed in them. Technology companies need to compete to be able to tap into this source of finance. And this requires communicating in a language that private equity can understand.

In general, AIM was regarded in a positive light. Respondents generally regarded AIM as a good home for small UK and overseas technology companies looking to list. Indeed AIM has become, de facto, Europe’s technology exchange. AIM’s credibility is no small part due to its ability to survive the 2001 crash while the EASDAQ and Neuer Markt perished. The consensus view of our respondents was that AIM’s existence means that UK technology companies do not need an equivalent of NASDAQ.

However, AIM could perform substantially better still if: • It had a higher profile. There was a general unawareness of its performance – £11 billion raised in ten years, £4.7 billion in 2004, 1,200 small companies listed across all sectors, over 90 percent of which remain on the exchange. AIM's profile could be raised by marketing an index of the leading technology companies on AIM.

• Coverage of technology companies on AIM could be better still, which in turn would raise the investment potential.

• There are few examples of companies (from any sector) migrating to the full exchange, casting AIM as a final destination, rather than as a stepping-stone.

In recent years, technology has flailed rather than flourished on the UK's main exchanges. With the exception of Vodafone and BT, technology is more marked by its absences. Only a few companies, namely Wolfson Microelectronics and Cambridge Silicon Radio, have made it to the market. This compares to dozens of companies that have made successful listings on NASDAQ with equivalent valuations in the same time period.

Several respondents commented that the UK financial sector’s inability to understand the value of technology has pushed some companies to list on the NASDAQ to attain a higher valuation. However the rigour and expense of Sarbanes Oxley, coupled with tighter US immigration policy, may cause a few technology companies to reconsider the benefits of listing in the UK or even to delist from US exchanges. Part of the solution to this situation is to raise the profile of AIM, as a stepping stone to full LSE listing – a process that will accordingly raise awareness of small cap technology companies and the genus of their businesses (the technology itself). Part of the solution, however, also requires banks and other institutions to hire more technology specialists to their analyst teams.

The technology industry will continue to be a evolve furiously over the next five years. The UK technology sector is, in several areas, suitably positioned to exploit the upcoming opportunities.

Deloitte expects the number of technologies – in the form of processes, devices, networks and services – that are in common usage, will grow. Technology will become an increasingly important differentiator of value creation for all companies and individuals. While elements of the technology sector will undergo ever steeper price deflation – particularly for consumer electronics – the size of the overall technology sector will increase – driven primarily by new fields of innovation such as biotechnology, genomics, fuel cells and nanotechnology.

There will be a growth – or even acceleration – in the number of technologies, in the form of devices, networks and services, that are in common usage. We use, in our home and business lives, far more technology than just five years ago. All manner of devices have become digital, from still camera to portable music players and toys.

Over the next five years, despite some convergence of devices, we will adopt a growing number and range of digital devices, for both private and business usage, for everything from entertainment to personal healthcare. Two of the drivers of device proliferation are nanotechnology – the manipulation of matter at the atomic level – and fuel cells, a new form of battery. Nanotechnology allows devices to be become ever smaller, while fuel cells provide greater power output over a longer period relative to current battery technology. According to our respondents, the UK is well-positioned in both of these areas, in terms of pure research and early stage companies.

We use an increasingly wide blend of wireline and wireless networks, from broadband to Bluetooth, from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to Wireless LAN. In the medium-term more network technologies will emerge, both wireline and wireless, of varying bandwidth and range. Wireless networks may, by 2010, even represent a separate Internet. Several respondents viewed that the UK was well placed to continue in its leading role in the mobile and wireless technology sector. Respondents noted that the UK’s relatively large and competitive cellular mobile market had created a healthy ecosystem of suppliers providing a wide range of products and services, from content to third party messaging.

Simultaneous to a proliferation in networks will be a growth in the number of objects, from games consoles to motorcars, that will become connected to a network. However while several respondents expected the UK to be a leading test bed for new products and services destined for the digital home, others questioned the UK’s ability to manufacture or deliver these new offerings.

Interaction and transaction based services are migrating more and more from the High Street to the PC. Yet the number of services yet to become web-based still easily outnumbers those that have already been transformed. Respondents viewed that while the UK has had a good track record of building web-based companies, it had not yet managed to develop a player with global scale.

Technology will become an increasingly important differentiator of value creation for companies and individuals. Businesses with the most extensive and efficacious use of technology will have a distinct competitive advantage over their peers. Increasingly it is not a case of technology giving an edge: technology adoption will just mean keeping up, as was shown in the UK’s retail sector last Christmas. While the High Street had a difficult Christmas, Internet-based sales jumped 20 percent to £3 billion, representing 6.3 percent of total spending. In one segment – electrical goods – sales jumped 42 percent over the previous year. Retailers that lacked an effective e-commerce operation were the net losers.

While adoption rates of technology will vary between sectors, wave after wave of new technologies will emerge. Thus while today some elements of the UK’s public sector marvel at the wonder that is e-mail, and journalists obsess with the Blackberry and on-line music, leading players in the retail sector are looking to implement billions of RFID tags to take chunks of cost out of the supply chain while some public transport systems contemplate developing electronic purses. Several of our respondents were actively involved in technology implementation and were confident about future prospects. Applications regarded as cutting edge over the previous five years, such as mobile-enabled field sales/service forces, are now becoming regarded as standard. Pilot implementations are being rolled out more widely.

While some parts of the technology sector will undergo ever steeper price deflation – particularly for consumer electronics – the size of the overall technology sector, based on this report’s definition, should grow. This will result from the growing pervasiveness of technology within our daily lives, in both developing and developed worlds. Technology will play a growing role across all industry sectors, from healthcare – where spend on technology is currently only a few percentage points – to mature adopters such as financial services, whose leading players are always looking to improve their revenue to cost ratios.

Perhaps more importantly, the technology sector as a whole will continue its current path of diversification and growth on a global scale. In just two decades, the entire sector has undergone an overwhelming period of change, with literally dozens of new fields emerging in the commercial arena – from nanotechnology to genomics. This process will continue, with the emergence of ever more high potential niche markets.

In some respects this trend may favour the UK technology sector, which is characterised by relatively small companies. It is becoming increasingly difficult for multinational technology companies to compete across all the increasingly diverse fields that make up the technology sector. If the UK’s small and medium sized technology companies can leverage their specialist knowledge and experience in emerging niches, in some respects they could out-compete their larger competitors in an increasingly fragmented global technology sector. However at the same time, UK technology companies will need to have sufficient scale to be able to invest in increasingly expensive research and development.

Given its strong intellectual property base, strategic location, stable economy and undeniable research expertise, the UK is reasonably well-positioned to succeed. However, its capacity to do so will be critically dependent on the ability of all organisations in the sector – universities, applied research organisations and commercial companies – to develop outstanding management skills including ability to work with financial institutions, that allow them to properly leverage their intellectual assets.

Current areas of government supported basic research, such as genomics and stem cell, will be the basis of new generations of products and services that have the capacity to make a global impact. Our respondents noted that the UK was currently one of the countries leading research in these and other areas, and the resulting knowledge would spawn a host of new companies. The only caveat that our respondents highlighted was that the full commercial impact of such new technology companies would not be felt for some time.

The UK’s technology sector is, in Deloitte’s view, reasonably wellpositioned overall. While the performance of the UK’s technology sector varies by sub-segment, its general direction is positive. Education, finance and government are all generally supportive of the UK’s technology sector, even if, in each case, performance should be improved. Demand for technology over the next five years, from consumers and businesses, should be healthy. However at the same time, the UK technology sector is vulnerable. International competition, particularly from China and India, will intensify. While the UK has been successful at attracting inward investment from technology internationals in general, our respondents warned that this could not be taken for granted and that research and development was particularly impermanent.

The question for the UK is how it can exploit its relatively strong position and improve its performance without succumbing to its vulnerability. Deloitte’s view is that the UK’s technology sector can thrive – but that this is incumbent upon all stakeholders in the industry. The approach should be to assume responsibility, rather as some respondents noted, to blame others. Figure 6 includes a list of recommendations and suggests which stakeholders should be associated with each.

A clear message coming from our research was the lack of communication between different groups in the UK’s technology sector. Whether this was the universities having insufficient dialogue with large technology companies, or angel investors being unable to reach out to potential investments, or small technology companies being unable to express their business case effectively to potential customers, the lack of communication was quite evident. Yet respondents also recognised that greater dialogue would likely lead to cooperation, which in turn may result in profitable collaboration or sales. Deloitte’s view is that all stakeholders in the UK’s technology sector would benefit from greater communication and that each could take ownership for this initiative.

The next generation of technology workers will shape the dynamic of the UK’s technology sector as well as the UK’s economy as a whole. Technology education needs to be considered from two perspectives: as an integral part of the individual’s career and as a core skill, the latter within business and personal contexts. General aptitude in technology is a shared responsibility between the educational system, the government, business and – most importantly – the individual. The UK’s technology education system will need to specialise in order to compete with the masses of technology graduates emerging from China and India by developing more value-adding courses.

The UK has a reputation for developing world-class technology. Unfortunately this reputation does not extend to commercialisation, where many respondents regarded the UK as performing weakly. The educational system, government, the financial sector and technology companies can all help change this situation. If the UK is to exploit fully the fruits of its research, it needs to ensure that theory, practice and benefits of commercialisation are clear to all involved in the technology sector:

• The basics of commerce should be taught in schools;

• Technology students at universities should have compulsory courses in business studies;

• There should be a culture of technology transfer in universities, acclimatising students to the link between invention and trade;

• Emerging technology companies, guided by their investors, need to have a balanced management combining technical and commercial abilities;

• Technology companies need to a good understanding of the various financing options available, from small business banking to full listings, and be able to communicate with different types of financial institutions;

• Technology entrepreneurs should be as lauded as inventors.

A more positive attitude towards entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs can be fomented by technology companies, the government and the financial sector, all of whom could highlight the important role that entrepreneurs can have in the institution and subsequent development of a successful technology company.

A more ambitious definition of entrepreneurship twinned with a more celebratory – rather than derogatory – view of entrepreneurs by the public would be beneficial for the UK’s technology sector. The UK’s entrepreneurs should aim to get very rich over a lifetime, rather than aspire to make a few millions in a few years. This requires following the U.S. model of serial entrepreneurship.

Winning entrepreneurs need to invest their gains into new businesses, either as angel investors or as owner-managers. The UK should also change its cultural attitudes towards entrepreneurs, who tend to be envied or derided.

The UK’s technology sector, guided by its investors and the government, should compete where it has a strong chance of success – in areas where it is specialised in any form, be this expertise, experience, intellectual property or international recognition. Thus to try and out-compete China for mass technology manufacture or India for more commoditised IT services would be folly. To try and outnumber the US in terms of global technology giants is self-defeating.

Thus the UK’s specialist approach to mobile phone manufacturing is encouraging. The UK no longer manufactures mobile phones (China is now the leading nation for this) but UK companies are among the leading developers of specialist intellectual property for mobile phones. ARM Holdings contributes chip design. CSR leads in Bluetooth chip design and manufacture. Symbian provides operating systems and applications.

Similarly while it would not be sensible to locate MP3 player manufacturing in the UK, ARM Holdings and Wolfson Microelectronics are able to earn healthy commissions from each iPod sold. The UK may not mass manufacture consumer electronics, but its capacity to add value remains strong.

Labour costs in China, India, Eastern Europe and other emerging countries are far lower than in the UK and will remain so for many years. While wage inflation will drive the cost of some developing country employees to UK levels, these will be the exception, not the norm. Figure 8 shows how the UK, for certain roles, is uncompetitive in comparison with emerging economies.

This does not, however, spell doom for the UK’s technology sector. The response should be to exploit wage rate differentials whenever this is beneficial. Successful off-shoring will drive improved profitability, in turn allowing companies to invest more. Best practice off-shoring, as delivered by US companies generates returns of up to 17 percent. While Deloitte’s research on the financial services and telecommunications sector suggests that the UK is the leading offshoring customer in Europe, it trails the US.

Not only does off-shoring offer a way of immediately reducing the overhead associated with certain types of jobs, it also offers companies a means of establishing a strategic foothold in markets that they otherwise might not have entered. Given that the natural location for the off-shoring activities of UK companies is India, and given the rapidly growing profile of the Indian economy and its technology sector, there is clearly a strong rationale for UK technology companies to continue pursuing off-shoring options.

UK technology companies should not be shy about identifying, exploiting and even advertising the shortcomings of other countries, particularly if these proffer the UK competitive advantage. The government should continue to use the DTI and major projects such as Foresight to monitor the performance of international competitors.

For example, the UK should market its status as one of the safest places to business in terms of the capacity to create and protect intellectual property (IP). Safeguarding of IP in some emerging countries can be poor. This is extremely important issue for technology businesses whose intellectual property represents a large share of their value.

The UK has successfully exploited regulatory uncertainty over stem cell research in the US to hold a leading position in this emerging area, which is expected to lead to some of the most important pharmaceutical developments over the next five years.

The UK, via the education process, technology companies and customers themselves, should engender a positive but pragmatic attitude to technology. The more this happens, the healthier the industry should be. Currently, however, the UK’s attitude towards technology is variable.

The UK’s consumers have the best attitude towards technology. They are leading adopters of technology, for communications and entertainment. The UK is one of the select markets with a mobile penetration of over 100 percent. The UK is one of only five countries to generate more than 20 percent of mobile revenues from data services. Only France has a greater number of broadband subscribers in Europe. The UK’s electronic games market is the third largest in the world.

Familiarity with technology at the consumer level is encouraging, especially when usage is by children. In the 1980s, the UK’s computer for schools program generated a generation of individuals who were amongst the first in the world to be computer literate. As a result in the early 1990s, the UK was unequivocally the world’s leading nation of computer programmers.

However technology adoption by businesses is less impressive. The UK has one of the lowest rates of usage of the Internet for receiving orders. According to some of our respondents, the Y2K obligation, the dotcom bubble and a few – but highly publicised – under-performances of public sector technology projects have all hardened scepticism towards technology.

Compare this to China, which has a seemingly voracious popular enthusiasm for technology. Perhaps ironically for a Communist State, executives of global technology companies are treated like celebrities. Reverence of technology entrepreneurs is also a feature of the US. In the UK the attitude towards technology entrepreneurs is too often one of indifference.

The UK is building a world class base of research and intellectual property in biotechnology, genomics, stem cell therapeutics, software programming (particularly in areas such as gaming, artificial intelligence and security), advanced materials, chemical engineering, advanced computing, pharmaceuticals and many other areas.

However few respondents were aware of the breadth of the UK’s knowledge base. This is a critical issue both for industry and government – the UK must regain its pride and its self-confidence, and do everything in its power to ensure that corporations and governments around the world recognise its continued ability to punch substantially above its weight in a wide range of technology markets.

UK technology companies, the financial sector and government should all make efforts to market better the UK technology sector’s commercial successes, while suppressing the British trait of glorifying failure.

All those in, or influencing, the UK technology sector should be asking: "how much can we grow?" and "where can we dominate" rather than "how much worse can it get". The ball’s in our court.

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