Let’s trade our way to success, Lord Digby Jones tells Yorkshire firms
YORKSHIRE businesses were urged to look for international opportunities as the economy moves into recovery at a major event featuring Lord Digby Jones, Greg Dyke and top economist Dennis Turner.
More than 120 representatives of regional firms attended the International Business Network (IBN) question time at the National Science Learning Centre in York, organised by the University of York and UK Trade & Investment (UKTI).
Lord Jones, a former trade minister and CBI director general and now the patron of IBN and chairman of the HSBC International Business Advisory Board, told the audience: “We have to get this nation trading again. We need to trade our way out of recession. And the only way in which we will ever succeed is if we grow our enterprise around the use of knowledge.”
To view a short interview by David Parkin with Lord Digby Jones, click on the screen below.
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Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC who is Chancellor of the University of York and now a serial business investor who owns a hotel in Sheffield, two golf courses, a development company and a company manufacturing machines used to make cardboard boxes, told the audience that the relationship between universities and business was key.
“We need to get the culture and character in universities into business,” he said.
HSBC chief economist Dennis Turner told the audience that the “good guys in the economy are export and investment”.
“Most economists think that we are through recession and into recovery. It is a bit of an alphabet soup about what type of recession we are in – L-shaped, U-shaped, W-shaped.
“Our view is that it will be U-shaped. Since 1945 recessions in this country have lasted between four and six quarters. My prediction hear today is that this one will last five!”
Lord Digby Jones is to lead a UKTI IBN mission to South Africa in February and companies interested in joining the mission took part in an informal briefing with him at the IBN York event.
The three speakers joined a question time discussion chaired by David Parkin of TheBusinessDesk.com which also involved two representatives of successful Yorkshire companies trading internationally.
Joyce Trueman of South Yorkshire-based Macalloy Bar & Cable Systems, said her company had doubled turnover to £12.5m since a management buyout six years ago and the company designs and threads high tensile bar systems for the construction industry and its products are used in canopies for Tesco supermarkets and at the new Doha International Airport as well as for bridges and sports stadia.
Simon Parker of Masham-based British Horse Feeds, said the company had grown turnover to £30m with sales in more than 20 countries including Australia, the US and South Africa.
British Horse Feeds, which was awarded a Queen’s Award for Innovation for its Speedi-Beet horse feed in 2008, is a division of family-run I’Anson Bros which was founded in 1900.
