The UK’s economic resurgence has led to hugely improved business forecasts, with exports and growth booming at present. Consequently, staff feel more secure in their positions and bosses better able to capitalise on opportunities that would have been met with caution during the recession.
As a result, leading professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has named UK chief executives as among the most confident in the world. The company’s research examined fields such as recruitment, financial outlook and growth in order to determine which countries are pulling ahead in terms of ambition, and which remain entirely focused upon simple survival above all other factors.
According to the results, a total of 93 per cent of chief executives in the UK are confident that their company’s financial prospects will be strong in the coming twelve months, whereas only 78 per cent answered in this way in 2013’s study. Furthermore, recruitment is on the cards for almost two thirds of the country’s chief executives, who plan to take on additional employees at some point in 2014.
This compares extremely favourably with the international average of 50 per cent, with low business confidence in many Eurozone countries in particular discouraging many global chief executives from initiating recruitment drives. In fact, only bosses in Korea, Taiwan and the Middle East are more likely to recruit higher numbers than those in the UK.
PwC UK chairman, Ian Powell, praised the country’s chief executives for putting plans into action and remaining optimistic in a sometimes challenging market. However, he also pointed out that opportunities exist which some are not necessarily taking full advantage of.
He said; “Companies right across the UK are moving beyond the private optimism they’ve been expressing in the boardroom to real activity in the market.
“At a time when, for example, China is rebalancing its economy towards consumption and imports, UK business needs to raise its sights and forge new relationships, or face a tough battle to regain lost ground.
“We have many world class businesses across sectors from retail, to business services, to speciality engineering, which are ideally placed to compete on the international stage.”
Certainly the only real negative aspect of the study for the UK is the fact that only 5 per cent of chief executives claimed to be examining growth potential in new export markets. This compared poorly to the international average of 14 per cent and could potentially see the UK left behind as other countries form closer, more exclusive ties.
With a large number of UK chief executives believing that shifts in economic power and demographic changes will affect their businesses in the coming years, it seems clear that British businesses must begin to look more earnestly overseas for growth opportunities in order to further the positive steps towards economic recovery taken so far.
Do you think the UK should be working harder to forge closer ties with firms in China, the Middle East and Russia, or should concentrating on the stability of the domestic market be a priority for now?
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