Brain Gain: Building a thriving future for all of Wales

GlobalWelsh’s ground-breaking research report ‘Turning Wales’ Brain Drain to Brain Gain’ uncovered what can only be described as a gold mine of opportunity for Wales. Out of the 1,700 respondents, 500 were business leaders located around the world that want to explore setting up operations or relocating their business to Wales. 125 of those wanted to do this in the next 12 months. If you think about the size of our diaspora as a whole, over 3 million people, that is a transformational opportunity for Wales to take advantage of right now.

An opportunity that those in power should be absolutely grabbing with both hands. But what mechanisms are in place to bring these opportunities to fruition? How do we leverage this interest from people who firstly, know Wales well and hence don’t require the ‘hard sell’ and secondly, will create jobs all across Wales not just the M4 corridor? The answer, sadly at this point in time, is we don’t know.

"Out of the 1,700 respondents, 500 were business leaders located around the world that want to explore setting up operations or relocating their business to Wales. 125 of those wanted to do this in the next 12 months."

To its credit, the Welsh Government has successfully attracted many large corporates to Wales - Airbus, Thales, Starling Bank (a Welsh diaspora-led business). Matched by the notable successes, however, are some notable failures too such as TVR, Ineos and Hitachi Nuclear Plant. This coming Winter the Welsh Government is planning an Investor Summit, exclusively focussed on attracting similarly large international businesses, something I applaud. We hope that the event will be a huge success and produce jobs for Wales that stay for the long term. But it’s clear that attracting large corporates is a long, hard road with big risks and also low sticking power. It only takes one policy change, one shift in geopolitics or a better offer elsewhere and it can easily be “Bye Bye Wales”.

The same cannot be said about the aforementioned low hanging fruit - opportunities from within our successful, loyal, passionate and knowledgeable diaspora. These opportunities may be small, but like Wales itself, they are mighty. Lower risk, higher reward and better suited to the start-up and SME culture across Wales. A great example of this is Delineate. An ambitious company, led by a member of the diaspora, James Turner (JT), who wanted to return and create jobs in his hometown of Llandysul. Imagine the difference 500 JTs could make to Wales’ fortunes and that’s just the start.

"How do we leverage this interest from people who firstly, know Wales well and hence don’t require the ‘hard sell’ and secondly, will create jobs all across Wales not just the M4 corridor? The answer, sadly at this point in time, is we don’t know."

Wales is currently missing out on these opportunities - big time. To solve this, quickly, we believe that a government-funded programme to attract Welsh led or owned businesses to Wales is our best chance of bringing jobs and prosperity to all regions of Wales and retaining young talent that can contribute to growing these relocating organisations.  Moreover the cost of creating these jobs are unlikely to be linked to government grants and other sweeteners used to entice larger companies. We believe a private-public collaboration has the potential to achieve compatible outcomes in a shorter timeframe, with more loyalty to Wales at a considerably lower cost to the public purse.

"Wales is currently missing out on these opportunities - big time. To solve this, quickly, we believe that a government-funded programme to attract Welsh led or owned businesses to Wales..."

We believe this so much that to get the ball-rolling we are going to be announcing an Autumn 2025 event to showcase the best that Wales has to offer to encourage these businesses to go one step further and embark on a plan to invest in Wales. We will showcase our skills base, entrepreneur incubation and soft landing spaces, business support programmes, legal support and more. Our overriding objective for doing so is to demonstrate that the barrier to returning is low, the opportunity is high and a broad spectrum of support is available.

We urge all our public sector stakeholders, especially the Welsh Government, to help us mine the goldmine that we have uncovered through evidence based research speaking directly to our diaspora business leaders and entrepreneurs.

To register your interest in attending or supporting the showcase here >>

If you are a Welsh public sector organisation, Welsh Government, City Deal or Council, looking to stem the loss of talent from your area and looking for ways to create jobs, then please get in touch and partner with GlobalWelsh on this important, first of its kind, event. 

Contact our CEO, Walter May directly on walter@globalwelsh.com or feel free to call, text or WhatsApp him on +44 (0)7787 386127.