The list, published by a specialist online magazine, places the city fourth in the UK and the highest in Wales.
Cities trailing in Swansea’s wake included London, Birmingham and Manchester.
Startups Geek – a web platform for start-up culture, digital creativity and entrepreneurialism – reports:
Only a couple of Welsh locations made it into our list, but Swansea was the king of those. Swansea performed similarly to rival Cardiff for many metrics in our scoring system, but it excelled for the cost of office space.
One metric on which Swansea scored highly was its ability to retain university graduates – a figure running at higher than 30%.
Swansea Council leader Rob Stewart said:
Startups Geek is an authoritative publication that’s passionate about creativity and start-up business – so it’s great for Swansea to be recognized by them. It supports the creative industries and freelance lifestyle and that’s a key factor in our city’s ongoing regeneration drive.
We want to attract and keep creative entrepreneurial people here, and that’s illustrated by projects such as the renovation of the beautiful Palace Theatre building and our plans for the striking 71-72 Kingsway digital village. Both will become home to fresh tech and creative businesses.
Our universities are playing a major role here and that’s why we’re helping bring high-quality student accommodation to the city centre. It’s all part of a city centre regeneration that’s already seeing hundreds of millions of pounds invested here by the public and private sectors.
As the UK business community attempts to navigate the impact of the first global pandemic in recent history, Startups Geek posed the question: When the economy and the business world regain some measure of normality, where in the UK would be the best place to start a new business?
Their journalists delved into fresh data and put together their first ever ranking of 40 towns and cities across the UK.
They looked at the cost of starting a business in different geographic areas, as well as other metrics such as internet speed.
Startups Geek Swansea stats include
- Average weekly full-time pay – £506.90
- Start-ups that survive five years – 38.3%
- Start-up office space cost over five years – £29,000
- Start-up team cost over five years – £774,640
Startups Geek league table – www.startupsgeek.com/uk-startup-business-data
