Previous Event Reviews
Getting Scotland Back on Track, 16th September 2009
Grand Ballroom, Glasgow Hilton Hotel
This event will provide Scottish businesses with expert advice on the best ways to position their company within the current challenging market place. Stephen Jardine, the breakfast host, will invite our key note speaker and panel members to comment on the current financial climate and offer their suggestions as to ways in which companies should best position themselves in order to withstand the current market. Our key note speaker, Prof John Kay, a top ecconomist and regular contributor to the Financial Times will also provide guests with his predictions for the economy in the future months/years. The audience will have the opportunity to question the panel and key note speaker with specific inquiries that they may have.
Ticket costs include full continental breakfast served with tea/coffee/fruit juice, access to the event and a replenishment of tea/coffee post event.
Insider 500, 9th January 09
Despite the doom and gloom of the global economic slowdown, there are signs that some Scottish businesses are optimistic that times could be starting to improve. This was the message put across by Scottish Enterprise chief operating officer Lena Wilson at a business breakfast hosted by Insider in January to celebrate the launch of Scotland’s top 500 listing for 2009.
While Wilson said the downturn had had an impact on all sectors, with many companies shelving growth plans and focusing on sustainability, reviews carried out by Scottish Enterprise showed that, of the 2000 businesses it deals with, most were significantly more optimistic than the wider Scottish business population. “Half of those companies had increased their turnover in the past six months, 20 per cent had static turnover and 22 per cent had a fall,” she said. “Contrast that to the last set of figures from Lloyds TSB – the reverse is true, with half seeing a fall, 29 per cent static and 20 per cent increase.”
Some 300 leaders from both the public and private sectors turned up at the Sheraton Grand Hotel & spa in Edinburgh to hear keynote speaker John Hawksworth give his take on the current economic problems and what is likely to happen over the next few months.
The head of macroeconomics at accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that house prices may fall a further 15 per cent over the next year to 18 months. “House prices are likely to fall further, which will have a dampening effect on house building and housing investment,” he warned.
Hawksworth also warned that, in terms of the economy, more fiscal action will be needed in the medium term – between 2011 and 2013. “Whoever wins the next election will have to bring in some combination of big tax rises and spending growth restraint” he explained. “It’s going to be a very tough environment for public spending and for taxation and that again will dampen the speed of the recovery.”
On Scotland, Hawksworth was surprised to find that the country has consistently grown slower than the UK over the last five years. He said that, when the figures for the period are broken down, it is very much in the business and financial services sector where Scotland’s growth has been weaker.
“That sector – perhaps surprisingly given Edinburgh’s financial services – is smaller in Scotland than the rest of the UK,” he explained. “In 2004, in the UK as a whole, the sector made up 30 per cent of the economy compared to 22 per cent in Scotland. The sector where Scotland is bigger is government services.” He said that might not be too bad going forward because government services have “quite good defensive properties”.
Along with Wilson and Hawksworth, other panel members – CBI Scotland director Iain McMillan, Murray Shaw, chairman and senior partner of law firm Biggart Baillie and Raymond O’Hare, regional director at Microsoft – discussed issues of concern and fielded questions from the audience.
McMillan took the floor and confirmed that the surveys and trends put forward by Hawksworth “chimed very closely with the results of our own surveys and forecasts”. In Scotland, he said, the industrial trends have been “very depressing” for the past few quarters. “Clearly there are major problems with orders, with output, exports and domestic sales,” he said. He added that overall growth for Scotland in 2009 was likely to be in the region of 1.7 per cent.
Insider Procurement Breakfast, 30th April 09
If the companies who attended Insider’s special event focusing on the subject of public procurement hadn’t registered on a number of key portal websites they certainly will have done by now.
The 150 strong audience were treated to a deluge of valuable information about how to be considered for contracts from the forthcoming London 2012 Olympic Games and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games as well as getting a share of the Scottish Government and UK Government’s combined £158bn procurement pot of cash.
Keynote speaker Gerry Gormal urged prospective contractors to pre-register for Glasgow city council’s Commonwealth Games portal which already has more than 4000 organisations signed up. Gormal who is Assistant Director of Development and Regeneration Services at the council started his address by talking about the wider economic picture in Glasgow.
He said the council believed that city could come out of this recession in some reasonable shape with many of the fundamentals needed to develop the economy still in place.
The key reason for that was a long list of projects and opportunities which were either under way or in the pipeline. Until the credit crunch Glasgow has enjoyed 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth.
“Each year it has grown by about 2.5 per cent – not spectacular in terms of the global economy but pretty good for an advanced western economy and about one per cent above the growth figure for Scotland,” he said.
Some 63,000 new jobs had been created in the city between 2000 and 2007 and about 45,000 have gone to Glaswegians. Most of this was built on the back of quite spectacular growth in the property sector. Last year the city had more than £4bn worth of work in progress or in the pipeline. He said as well as the work lined up for the games there was a significant amount of additional activity taking place in the city. Inward investment was continuing to grow and we expect to meet our target for 2009 of 1500 new jobs.
“Despite the downturn in the banking industry companies that are downsizing in an international sense are developing and growing their business in Glasgow,” he said
Fortis and BNP Paribas had made announcements about expansion in recent months.
Gormal said that all sorts of infrastructure projects would and are taking place and not all are games related such as the M74 extension and the new rail link to Glasgow airport.
Direct games projects include £294m of investment on venues between now and 2014.
The £245m games village procurement was already under way.
“The aim is to have a significant amount of this work completed and the venues in place by 2012,” he said. The new procurement portal which is due to be officially launched in August will advertise all of the opportunities.
“If you are interested then the opportunity is to get your name there now and details on your company and services you offer and if you do that you will automatically feed through into the portal when it goes live later on this year,” he said.
He said the council’s intention was to run the procurement through the European Union framework in a way that is transparent and open but also to do it in a way that benefits companies in Glasgow. It wanted companies which won the big contracts to also use the portal to advertise sub contracting opportunities. The portal would provide details about projects and there would also be information there about potential suppliers who can match to specific contracts.
Glasgow city council also plans to hold a number of events around the launch of the portal to give details of the opportunities coming forward and the kind of criteria that will be set in relation to awarding these contracts.
Jillian Moffat who is Head of Scottish Enterprise’s Olympic and Commonwealth Games Legacy team concentrated on the London opportunities. “The opportunities for that are here and now in procurement,” she said. The two governing bodies letting contacts for London 2012 are the Olympic delivery authority (ODA) which responsible for the infrastructure with £6bn worth of funding and LOGOG (The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games) which s responsible for preparing and staging the 2012 Games.
The ODA had awarded £3.5bn of its contracts and Moffat said she wouldn’t really expect Scottish companies to be winning them. “However what is happening now is the tiers beneath that are beginning to be let,” she said.
One of the key things that both games were trying to achieve was to make sure that as many business opportunities as possible went to small business and a portal called Compete For had been developed to make sure that happened. “The construction stuff is out there and there is tons of service stuff about to be procured,” she said.
“I think what is important for Scottish business at the moment is that we are now beginning to get into the tier two, three and four levels and that is where we would expect Scottish businesses to be winning business from London. I am pleased to say that today we have got 28 scottish companies – the majority of them are in the SME category – that have won games related contracts. Now politicians and press might say well that is just a small number when 800 contracts have been let. But let’s build on that small number. You have got to be in it to win it.”
The ODA has contractually oblige tier one contractors to free up 20 to 30 per cent of their supply chain and that goes on as an opportunity on Compete For. “It then acts as a dating agency so if you register your company details on there they can be matched to opportunities,” said Moffat
“Currently there are about 60,000 organisations registered on Compete For and one of the by-products we are now seeing is we are getting non-games related contracts on there. That is good news for any business based in the UK. So rather than just Olympic contracts we have contracts for tier two and three suppliers. We have a company in Scotland which loved the system so much it got 100 opportunities on there because they were looking for new suppliers across the geography of the UK and getting a new supplier is an expensive activity.”
She said the other by-product was that it was a fantastic intelligence tool. “You can see everyone who is purchasing and if you are pretty canny and see a company which has won a contract on tier two and I am on tier five I will introduce myself to that company and put myself in front of them and say what I am and what I can do and what I can deliver.
“The other thing is if you get used in 2012 you are in a better situation to procure for 2014 and more importantly go for that public procurement pod which is £8bn in Scotland but £150bn across the whole of the UK. Given the economic climate we are currently in I don’t think anybody could sniff at that.”
Jennifer Smith who represented the Scottish Government said that Finance secretary John Swinney considered the public procurement market to be absolutely essential in helping the country steer a path and support the economy throughout the economic difficulties.
She urged suppliers to sign up to the new Public Contracts Scotland portal - a one stop shop where all public sector business opportunities above £50,000 are advertised.
“So we are starting with low value contracting opportunities advertised to the business community,” she said. “It is very easy to register. It literally takes two or three minutes and you just give us your name, business and email address and the type of services and goods you supply and any time that a public services body advertises an opportunity in that area you will receive an email alert to that effect.”
“You will also receive emails alerts about who gets the business so again it is a networking tool where small companies may see a contract they consider too big for them can take note of it and email whoever gets the business with a follow up for a sub contracting opportunity.”
Since it was launched over 24,000 suppliers have registered and there has been over 3000 contract opportunities made available.
The Insider Procurement Business Breakfast also featured a Question and Answer session with Gormal, Moffat and Smith together with fellow panel members Gordon Arthur, Director of Communications for Glasgow 2014, Murray Shaw, chairman of leading law firm Biggart Baillie and Alison Butchart of the Intellectual Assets Centre.
The event was sponsored by Biggart Baillie, the Intellectual Asset Centre and Scottish Enterprise.
