Newport Is a City on the Rise

2025 marked a turning point for Newport, with major investments and announcements laying a strong foundation as the city heads into 2026.

Over the last year, more than £100 million has been committed to the Port; Newport has been named part of the South Wales AI Growth Zone, bringing £10 billion of investment and at least 5,000 jobs to the region; and hundreds of millions are being invested in rail, including new stations in Newport East… and so much more.

Regardless of the headlines you see, Newport is riding an exciting crest of a wave, at the forefront of a new industrial revolution that is bringing jobs and investment to our city.

Being polite about it, Newport’s location just off the M4 is often seen by many as more of a curse than a blessing. Yet what truly sets the city apart is its wider transport infrastructure. Rail and sea links, rooted in Newport’s key role during the first industrial revolution when coal was king, remain central to its appeal today. This connectivity is once again attracting businesses and investment, positioning Newport as a city on the rise.

Take, for example, the news from late last year that Cleveland Group opened the largest site in the company’s history right here in Newport. The new five-acre depot at the Port, according to the company, “marks a major strategic step in supporting growing customer demand for container, hire and modular solutions.” Cleveland described Newport as the “perfect strategic location. It positions us to better serve South Wales, the Midlands and even London, and it gives us the capability to support major infrastructure and renewables projects.”

Throw a stone in any direction in Newport and you will find someone whose father, grandfather or great-grandfather worked at the Port. Many families migrated to Newport during the height of the industrial revolution to take work at the Port, and its legacy still runs deep (pun not intended).

Today, the Port of Newport remains one of the most significant in the country. Handling around £1 billion of trade each year, it processes more steel than any other UK port. Another announcement at the end of last year, building on an £80 million investment earlier in the autumn, will help extend this further, with millions being poured into a new deep-water berth at Middle Quay (pun intended).

As ABP stated at the time, “the new quayside will expand port capacity and allow Newport to handle larger vessels, enhancing its role in global supply chains and supporting businesses seeking access to international markets.”

Connected to the city and the entire UK via rail links, the millions of tonnes of iron and steel imported through Newport Docks every year are dispatched to steelworks around the country directly, including to Tata’s Llanwern site.

In conversations, I am often met with surprise that Llanwern is still producing world-class steel. In fact, the automotive galvanising line in Newport is the only one of its kind in the UK, producing world-class steel for Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Mini, Stellantis and others, with steel for construction also coming off the line. Around 1,500 people are employed around the plant.

The average age of the engineers at Tata Llanwern is around 30, and jobs are well paid and highly skilled, embracing new technology and proving that this industry has plenty of life left in it yet.

Right next door and handily placed given that Llanwern Steelworks has the largest private rail sidings in the UK, is Spanish train manufacturer CAF. From its Newport base, CAF produces trains and trams for use across Wales and for markets around the world, again bringing well-paid, skilled jobs to the city.

One of the first businesses to find a home at the expanding Indurent Park in Glan Llyn, CAF were last year joined by AerFin, a globally-operating company specialising in aviation assets who have relocated their HQ to the city.

Named as the Fastest Growing Profit-led Firm at the UK Fast Growth Index Awards in December, the company’s 116,000 square foot facility is state of the art and brings even more much-needed highly skilled jobs to the city.

Another Newport company that made the UK Fast Growth Index Awards is a Newport East born and bred business that I am a huge champion of: HONA. Listed as 81st in the top 200 UK businesses featuring in the UK Fast Growth Index, the growth of this business from a back bedroom on Corporation Road at the start of the pandemic to sitting on the cusp of international trade in under five years is nothing short of phenomenal and absolutely testament to the talent and entrepreneurship in our city.

Of course, a piece on the exciting crest of the wave that Newport is surfing would not be complete without making mention of the tech industry that is attracting hundreds of millions of pounds of investment to the city, driving thousands of jobs and attracting people to the Newport from Bristol and further afield.

I was pleased to welcome the announcement from the multi-award-winning Newport East-based company de Novo Solutions at the end of last year. A digital transformation consultancy, de Novo was the highest-ranked Welsh company on both the Sunday Times 100 and Deloitte Technology Tech Fast 50 lists for 2025. Continuing its mission to bolster the Welsh tech industry by launching its 50 in 5 initiative – creating 50 new career opportunities by 2030, as well as expanding its graduate apprenticeship programme.

Sitting alongside the city’s globally significant semi-conductor cluster, and within the newly announced AI Growth Zone, de Novo are based minutes away from KLA’s original Newport site on Ringland Way, which over the decades it’s been there has been at the heart of digital innovation, developing new technology that we all use every day, and building the kit that makes the semi-conductors we are all so dependent on now.

With their second facility now open in the west of the city, new job opportunities are regularly opening up offering people in Newport well-paid, highly-skilled jobs for now, and for the future, all of which are being developed using private investment, supported by investment by the UK Government, such as the recently announced addition £10m investment into the city’s semi-conductor cluster, and the £5m allocated to training that sits alongside the AI Growth Zone.

The businesses I’ve mentioned here are merely the tip of the iceberg. As we march into 2026, Newport is very much a city on the rise. The city’s story is one of resilience and adaptability, a city that’s unafraid to grasp the future with both hands.

And, with world-class connectivity and talent, and a young population, Newport stands ready to build on its global reputation and shape its own next chapter.

Just like it always has done.