One of the roles of a UK exporter is, at its essence, to help other UK companies to export more, to encourage and assist non-exporters to export, and to aid government as its most trusted source of exporting advice, so as to help UK business maximise UK strengths as the sixth-largest exporter of goods, the world’s second-largest exporter of services, the ninth-largest manufacturing nation and strengthen the UK as a global, green, science superpower.
These are noble, and there must be nobility of service in UK exporting for it to play its vital part in the UK’s ‘Global Force for Good’ ambition, which is the United Kingdom’s stated Integrated Review aim in its Foreign Policy.
My own company, Coltraco Ultrasonics is now the world’s only company to design, manufacture and export instruments and systems to monitor the contents of both liquefied and non-liquefied gaseous extinguishing systems, the flow rates of water deluge and sprinkler systems and we have recently developed an instrument to identify the liquid level contents of fluids in pipework, in both horizontal and vertical planes. This year we won our second Queen’s Award for Enterprise and export 90% of our manufactured output to 120 countries.
An objective in this is to ‘tilt’ exports to the Indo-Pacific (accounting for 56% of global economic growth by 2050). Trade, finance and science are key to the UK being a Global Force of Good in a contested and competitive world, and secure its aims of global stability, security & prosperity.
There is a prosperity continuum. it says that domestic stability & domestic security are the prerequisites of domestic prosperity, which finances our collective security that enables global stability, security and global prosperity. Successful UK exporters are key to all three.
Our national economic future depends on us creating a high-technology, high-growth, high-exporting economy to fulfil our prosperity and deliver economic hope for those in our society with less than many of us have ourselves and help create a more secure and stable world.
So, if you are a UK exporter, you are doing more in public service, through your private exporting service, than you may know, because you are playing your part to make a more prosperous United Kingdom and a more prosperous, stable and secure world, too.
The government’s export strategy implements the UK’s independent, sovereign trade policy – we see it now in our FTAs, the TCA with the European Union and our seat at the World Trade Organisation – helping shape one of the world’s key instruments of our rules-based international system. Our Australian FTA excitingly allows future technologies to be included before their invention, by its ‘Future Innovation Chapter’, and it set the tone for the UK’s CPTPP accession, the first European country to join this economic grouping that accounts for 15% of the world’s GDP.
UK exporters might remember too ‘our Isaac Newton selves’ – we cannot innovate unless we invent first. Whether in the export of goods or services, that British ‘inventive spirit’ has given our country more Nobel Prize Winners for Science at one Cambridge college than entire peer nations.
It enabled the Industrial Revolution itself, transforming our country by the commercialisation of science. And it will do the same for us today. I warmly welcome the new Department for Science, Innovation & Technology and the Department of Business & Trade. Just as the only great science is truthful science, so is the only great business with business integrity.
True success is defined as more than the material. Genuine public service is not only in the hands of our brilliant civil service or our parliamentarians. It exists as much in the dedication, truth and success of your private service too. Where both private and public service combine, we create shared, national endeavour. And when the British do that we create global landmarks, just as at the Coronation, and beacons of hope too.
Many of you work closely with UK Export Finance, the world’s oldest credit agency. UKEF’s recent 10bn uplift announcement has raised UKEF’s maximum exposure from £50bn to £60bn.
UKEF can help companies, including SMEs, with its Export Development Guarantee and General Export Facility products to support exporters, and insure against non-payment, and help overseas buyers who procure from UK companies too.
At DBT, UK Business support is available via its Export Support Service, the Export Academy and GREAT.gov.uk
With exports now reaching the £833bn levels, we can have every confidence of meeting the £1tn ambition by 2030. We need now to start properly expanding our exporting base to create exporting scale as well as exporting volume. We might also see that the vanguard of UK productivity already exists, in UK exporters, who are 20% more profitable and sustainable than non-exporters.
The opportunities for all of us as UK exporters have never been higher, to help create stability and security as a consequence of our prosperity. That is, like you, a winning combination. You are playing your part in public service by your highly productive private sector service. I warmly congratulate you and thank my friend, Mr David Staddon, for the opportunity to write this article.
Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter OBE is Chairman of Coltraco Ultrasonics, a high-exporting manufacturer, Chairman of the British Exporters Association, Director-General of the Durham Institute of Research, Development & Invention at Durham University, Director of the Centre of Underwater Acoustic Analysis, Professor-in-Practice at Durham University Business School, Chairman of the Council on Geostrategy Forum, Visiting Fellow of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre and Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology.
A former Greenjacket Officer, he was a member of the government’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery Taskforce and advises several government departments. His company has won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, in International Trade twice, in 2019 and 2022. He holds an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Durham and the University Senate’s highest Dunelmensis Award, for contribution to undergraduate development and scientific research. Carl was recently honoured with the OBE for services to business and international trade.
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