London Tops European E-business Poll

LONDON-London leads Europe as the best place to locate an e-business according to the first European e-Locations Monitor from real estate consultants Healey & Baker.

Senior executives from 201 specialist e-business companies consistently rated London ahead of Europe’s other leading locations. And the survey found that e-businesses approach decisions about location in a very different way to conventional businesses.

The most important consideration is a reliable electricity supply and fibre capacity or bandwidth; followed by the availability of staff with appropriate skills and access to markets. Crucially, the importance of English – the language of the web – being spoken, was also rated higher than it is among traditional business.

Colin Hargreaves, head of e-business at Healey & Baker said: ‘London may be a centuries-old business centre but that hasn’t stopped it adapting successfully to the new ways of working that are necessary for e-business – while still capitalising on its traditional strengths.’

Paris was rated as the second-best e-business location in Europe followed by Amsterdam, Dublin and Frankfurt. Other UK locations to make it into the 26 nominated locations were Cambridge which was placed fourteenth, Thames Valley sixteenth and Scotland’s Silicon Glen twenty-first.

World-wide, locations in the United States are still seen as the dominant e-business centres with seven of the top 11. The West Coast’s reputation for leadership in the web world is demonstrated by San Francisco’s number one position, keeping New York in second place. Outside of the US, Tokyo is the leading city with Hong Kong and Singapore as the next most desirable locations.