Over the past 20 to 30 years, how has the way UK mid-market companies approach international expansion changed?
The first thing I would say is that the shift has not been linear. I have been working in this area since 2013, starting with UK Trade and Investment, a joint agency of the Foreign Office and the business department, when I was posted in Hong Kong. I have followed this evolution through multiple governments, multiple economic cycles, and of course Brexit.
Early on, the debate within government was sometimes narrowly framed around trade balance and direct exporting. But one of the ministers I worked with, Francis Maude, was clear that overseas direct investment mattered just as much as export volumes. That was an important conceptual shift, particularly relevant in markets like China where you simply cannot deliver many services by exporting from the UK. You must be present locally.
What milestones in the UK–France trade corridor stand out as genuinely defining during this period?
In the run-up to Brexit and its immediate aftermath, a different question took center stage: should UK companies establish a foothold within the EU Single Market? That was, frankly, politically complicated for a government that had been messaging that Brexit would bring clear benefits for business. So there was some caution in that advice. What we did not want to do was push companies to set up EU entities if they genuinely did not need to.
What actually happened was more modest than some of the headlines suggested. The French government did a good job of courting London’s financial services industry, and some firms did move parts of their operations to Paris. But when I arrived here in 2023, French media were still reporting that London had essentially collapsed and that everyone had relocated to Paris, which is simply not accurate. The numbers involved were in the small thousands of jobs, not the tens of thousands sometimes claimed.
On the positive side, Brexit created a genuine opportunity to broker our own trade deals. There was significant growth in the teams working on those negotiations, and the program has delivered real results, including, most recently, the UK–India Free Trade Agreement, which has been welcomed especially by the Scotch whisky industry.
Has Brexit accelerated a regionalisation of European strategy among UK companies – or pushed them toward broader global diversification?
In the financial services sector, some structural changes became permanent. The major American banks that moved parts of their trading floors to Paris did so to retain access to the Single Market, and those positions are not coming back. Paris was attractive in a way that Frankfurt or Amsterdam perhaps was not for people already accustomed to London. But again, this was at a scale that was real but contained.
For smaller and mid-sized exporters, the dominant story was psychological rather than structural. In the first year or two after Brexit, a significant number of companies simply stopped exporting to France and the EU, not because they genuinely could not, but because they perceived the new environment as too complex and too risky. For a small business operating on thin margins, the fear of a shipment delayed or stuck at a border, stock expiring, a client lost, was enough to push them toward the domestic market. We spent considerable effort persuading those companies that exporting to the EU is still far simpler than exporting to most of the rest of the world.
How has the market responded to the initial friction of Brexit over time?
Gradually, many of those companies have come back. The ones that had stepped away, taken stock, and then organized their systems properly have mostly resumed. For larger companies, the priority above all is certainty and predictability, they can adapt to new procedures, but they need those procedures to be stable.
Which regulatory divergence has created the most friction in the UK–France corridor?
On regulatory divergence, I would push back on the characterization that divergence has been substantial. We started from complete alignment, and deliberate divergence has been limited. The current government has been explicit about wanting to maintain close alignment with EU standards and to diverge only where there is a compelling reason to do so. The SPS agreement negotiations currently underway are a practical expression of that intent. Where there have been cases that appeared to go beyond what the Trade and Cooperation Agreement provides for, for example, sample sizes at border checks that were disproportionate to what testing actually required, we raise those bilaterally, case by case.
Among the initiatives you have been most proud of, what were the defining lessons for the UK team?
One of the most effective shifts in how we work has been moving from a reactive service model to a more proactive, opportunity-led approach. When I look back fifteen years or so, most of what our teams did was respond to companies who came to us asking for help exporting to a specific market. That model made less and less sense as demand grew and government resources stayed constrained.
Today, the majority of my team works differently: we identify strategic market opportunities first, then work with colleagues in London to find the right UK companies to connect with those buyers. Around the Paris 2024 Olympics, for instance, we tracked tenders from the organizing committee and the French government and made sure relevant UK companies were aware of and positioned for those opportunities. With major aerospace contractors, we do the same, mapping their innovation needs and running pre-qualified trade missions.
We have also got better at telling companies when a market is not the right one for them. A colleague in Belgium once described a constant flow of gin exporters wanting to enter what is already a saturated market, being able to redirect them toward a market with genuine appetite is a real service. The network across our European posts now allows us to do that effectively.
Were there any unexpected difficulties following Brexit that impacted business sentiment?
As for unexpected lessons from Brexit: I arrived here in 2023, so I was in China while the immediate disruption was unfolding. But the thing I had not fully anticipated was the depth of the psychological impact, both on UK companies and on French businesses considering investment in the UK. The perception that the UK had become hostile or unwelcoming created a real hesitation that the numbers did not justify. French investors remain among the most significant sources of inward investment into the UK, but the question of whether they would still be welcome was genuinely felt.
The state visit by the King to France in 2023 and President Macron’s return visit to the UK in 2025 made a real difference to that psychology. The senior business roundtable at Number 10, bringing together the top thirty companies from both countries in the presence of both heads of government, sent a clear signal that the bilateral relationship remained strategically important, whatever the political turbulence around Brexit.
Looking ahead, do you see Brexit leading to further divergence or gradual re-integration?
The current government’s direction is clearly toward closer alignment, not further divergence. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) negotiations, the stated policy of diverging only where there is a strong justification, the tone of bilateral engagement, all of that points in the same direction. I do not expect to see a return to Single Market membership, but the pragmatic impulse is toward reducing friction wherever possible.
What capabilities will genuinely differentiate the mid-sized companies that succeed in this landscape?
On the question of fragmentation versus rebuilding: the picture is very sector-specific. In financial services, the structural moves that happened are largely permanent. For the vast majority of mid-cap exporters, though, the story is one of adaptation and return. Companies that paused are mostly back. The framework is understood. The administrative steps are handled.
The capabilities that differentiate the companies that do well are, in my experience, three things.
First, genuine market understanding, not projecting assumptions onto a market, but actually understanding what is happening there and why.
Second, organizational readiness, the willingness to get your systems, your customs processes, your administrative infrastructure right. For companies that did that, Brexit was an inconvenience, not a barrier.
Third, relationship capital, both at the governmental level, where bilateral relationships smooth friction points, and at the commercial level, where trust built over time is what gets problems resolved when they arise.
If a UK mid-cap came to you today, how would you structure their approach to be genuinely resilient?
I would say first that we do not write their strategy for them, we advise on it, and the analysis has to be theirs. But the starting point I always push for is market-neutral intelligence: understand where the genuine commercial opportunity sits before you commit to a specific geography. It sounds obvious, but it is routinely skipped.
One thing that comes up constantly is that companies choose markets for emotional rather than commercial reasons. A company might say they want to expand in France because they love Paris, or because the founder spent time there. Those factors of familiarity are not meaningless, they do ease relationship-building, but they are not a substitute for market analysis. I recently worked with a company whose sector was growing strongly in Spain but who had missed the entry window. By mapping the conditions that had driven that Spanish growth and asking colleagues across the network where those same conditions were emerging, we were able to redirect them toward Portugal, a market they had not initially considered, but where the timing and trajectory were much more favorable.
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