Greedy bosses stop Britain creating its own global giants

Star tech investor’s attack on ‘stupid’ UK boards who sell-out to foreign predators

BRITAIN is failing to pro- duce global tech giants because bosses are too greedy and lack ambition, a fund manager has claimed.

Attacking corporate culture, James Anderson, manager of Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, said while the UK had pioneered major scientific breakthroughs, firms were ‘unfit for purpose’ and ‘deserve to fail’.

Anderson, who is one of the most successful tech investors in the world and looks after £7bn of savers money, labelled boards ‘short-term greedy and long-term stupid’ and said bosses had shunned riskier but ‘spectacular possibilities’ that had catapulted rival Silicon Valley companies such as Amazon, Tesla and Google to success.

‘My prevailing belief is that new British companies fail to compete at scale because they deserve to fail, not because they are doomed to do so,’ he wrote in a blog post.

‘To put it more bluntly: they are unsuccessful because they (and we) are unambitious – indeed, unfit for purpose.’

A series of British tech firms have been sold off to foreign investors in recent years, including payments giant Worldpay and flight booking service Skyscanner.

And Anderson pointed to Cambridge-based chip maker ARM Holdings as a key example.

He said it was ‘Britain’s sole serious shot’ at building a global tech giant before it was sold to Japan’s Softbank for £24bn two years ago.

Masayoshi Son, Softbank’s founder, later bragged that ARM could become as valuable as Google’s £ 595bn parent company, Alphabet.

Anderson wrote his blog post from a café in Menlo Park, the area in California where Facebook has moved. He had just visited Grail, a company attempting to develop blood tests for early-stage cancers using genetic data.

Grail was spun out of US biotechnology giant Illumina, which bought Cambridge-based Solexa in 2006 for around £315m.

Solexa – started by Cambridge University scientists – pioneered the revolutionary technology which is the foundation of Illumina’s gene sequencing business. Illumina is today worth £31bn.

Anderson said: ‘Next generation genomic sequencing was literally invented in a pub in Cambridge.

‘This could – should – have been a British success story based not in Menlo Park but in Cambridge.’

The fund manager said Elon Musk, the South African founder of Tesla, had relocated to America’s West Coast for the same reasons as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: ‘He’s clear it’s because people like him can dream there. Britain doesn’t understand that outliers matter.’ Anderson declared: ‘We fail at every level. I see nothing on the horizon to change this terrible record. It’s very sad.’

Anderson is one of Britain’s most successful fund managers, turning £10,000 into almost £32,000 over the past five years.