Delegates from the tech sector of British Columbia, the west Canadian province known as Silicon Valley North, will land in London this week for the sector’s first trade mission to the UK.
The start-ups will be meeting BT and other major British technology and telecoms companies on Wednesday and Thursday in the hopes of finding commercial partners on these shores, before travelling to Mobile World Congress, the business-to-business exhibition held annually in Barcelona.
The tech scene in Vancouver, about 800 miles north of San Francisco, is growing swiftly as American companies look to expand.
"Europe is seen as the next logical step for further expansion for the new wave of innovators that are coming out of the province,” a spokesperson for the European Trade and Investment Representative Office for British Columbia, the organisers of the business development trip, told the Telegraph. “London, in particular, is also seen as an important springboard with its Commonwealth connections, central European location, lack of language barrier and investment opportunities.”
The province’s tech sector contributes up to $26bn to Canada's GDP, accounting for 7.6pc of the country’s economy, according to a KPMG report published last year. It creates or sustains between 165,000 and 188,000 jobs, delivers up to $12bn in labour income and has seen real weekly wages grow twice as fast as the national average.
British Columbia is the birthplace ofHootsuite, the social media dashboard; Sierra Wireless, the global leader in machine-to-machine wireless technology; and DWave, the world’s first commercial quantum computing company.
It is also the second home of corporate giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Samsung.
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