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Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday revealed her ambition to make the UK the best place in the world to be an entrepreneur. Surely she's also targeting tech entrepreneurs. The speech detailed the government's plans has tried to spur economic growth, although they are seen more as long term investments. She set out plans to work with companies based here to deliver jobs and investment in Britain. We will be hearing from Chancellor
Rachel Reeves in the coming few minutes. Before we hear from her and the interview that she's giving to Bloomberg Television today, we want to get reaction to the government's plans with ronand Harris. Who is EMEA president at snap which of course is the firm behind snapchat. Ronand thank you so much for your time.
Good morning, Good morning.
What did you make of the Chances speech yesterday? Over the summer her government acts one point three billion pounds in tech funding. Do you think that this is a pro business, pro tech administration.
I thought the Chancellor's comments were very encouraging. You know, the UK has got one of the world's leading tech sectors. It contributes one hundred and fifty billion a year to the UK economy. It's got one of the largest startup sectors across the region. It's got more unicorns being made in the UK than in any other country around Europe. So it's great to see the government getting behind that, and I think infrastructure plays a really important role in it.
I think are comments around regulation and making sure that regulation is balanced with the growth agenda are super encouraging.
On the regulatory front, Ronning and good Morning. There have been some warnings around, of course, a constant kind of hand ringing and concerns and many of those legitimate around social media, the impacts on children and some of the content out there the technology sectually be to Carl, he's suggested that a ban on social media for the under
six things could be potentially on the table. Would what would the snapchat reaction or the snap reaction be to that kind of regulatory emphasis, to what extent with that impact the business?
Yeah, So I think listen. Regulation is important in order to protect consumers across a whole host of different industries. I think what's important is that the government makes sure that it's efficient, it's not overlapping and that it balances that consumer needs with the need for growth. You know, at Snap, we have our platform Snapchat, which is available to you know, tens of millions of people across the
UK that use it on a daily basis. We also have a very important tech investment up in Oxfordshire around the development of hardware in augmented reality, and the UK
is a leading innovator in that space as well. So I think balancing the agenda around protecting consumers right across the UK, but also ensuring that these new emerging technologies in fields like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, where the UK has, as you know, incredible talent, it's got world leading research and it's now starting to see a whole flew of tech startups and spin out companies starting to emerge and the government needs to make sure that they're behind that growth.
Rod are are you? Are you leading into that?
Then?
Is Snap adding investment expanding investment in the UK? Is that part of the plan this year? And what are you doing in terms of headcount? What does that look like by the end of twenty twenty five here in the UK?
Yeah? Absolutely, So we are investing. We are increasing our investment in the sales and the commercial side of the business, but very importantly on the engineering side as well. So, as I mentioned, we have a world leading research and snap on hardware around augmented reality and a lot of that is based out of our location up in Abingdon
in Oxfordshire, and we're aggressively expanding that. So we believe that augmented reality is on the precipice of a kind of a paradigm shift and it's going to land in the hands of consumers over the next two or three years and we're very excited to be leading in that space and the UK is the home of that innovation and research for us.
Okay, that's interesting. The issue is, though surely based in Oxford, you know, I'm sure you welcome the Oxford Cambridge Arc, the issue that that has been more than twenty years under consideration, and that the kind of investment that the government is talking about will take years, maybe even decades to improve the road rail connections, to build out houses
in the area. And that compared to the short term hit that the Chancellor is put onto businesses by increasing taxes on employers, you know, short term, the hit remains how optimistic can you be.
Well. Listen. We know that the Chancellor's job is to balance the economy and make sure that they're covering the
national core space as well as fuel and growth. And we think that the opportunity here of investing in infrastructure as these new industries grow and propagate, that there's places for people to live, they can get in and that work, but also that the infrastructure is there to be able to fuel startups and ideas that are coming out of the great academic institutions and research institutions and turning them
into commercial enterprise. I think there's still work to be done about how we improve the flow of capital into some of these scale up opportunities in the UK, and I think there are things that we'd encourage government to continue to look at and see if they can accelerate.
Where are we do you think rown in terms of the competition around talent, do we need to make it easier to attract talent to the UK?
Listen? In some of these cutting edge fields, whether it's AI, augmented reality, it's definitely a war on talent, and globally a lot of the talent is very mobile, but the UK is already quite attractive in terms of again the quality of the institutions that we have here, the world's leading research in some of these fields, and we've got some of the world leading companies in these fields as well. So making sure that the brand around that is understood
internationally I think is very important. And as and when we're finding that world's leading talent, we should be encouraging them into the UK so that we can build teams around them and build businesses around them.
Is there anything in the offer from government that is going to do that? And I would add, I mean, I think our universities are fantastic too, and was educated through the UK system. Having said that, the Office for Students has previously said that forty percent of UK universities are operating at a financial deficit during the twenty twenty three to twenty four academic year. They are under enormous financial pressure. We know that probably some are going to
find it immensely difficult in the coming year. There's pressure to increase fees, you know, that's what the industry is relying on, is actually a resource that is hugely under pressure.
It's incredibly important that we support our academic institutions. We know I've talked about the fact that we're continuing to invest with growing our teams in the fields of augmented reality, also in the work that we do around artificial intelligence.
So far we've been able to find all of the talent that we need in the UK, so we're not suffering from a shortage, but we know it's incredibly competitive out there, and I think anything we do in particular to fuel the talent flow into early stage companies and into small and medium enterprises across the UK, I think
that's going to be incredibly important. One of the things that I hear from the small and medium sized businesses that we work with on the advertising front across the UK is you know they have felt pressure around a burden of regulation. They've also found increase in course of employment and finding the right talent to do some of these more advanced roles has been challenging, and we need
to think about ways about how we fuel that. The education sector very important that we keep high quality and high volume of people coming out but into our industries, but I think also going out, is there international talent that we can attract into the UK as critical as well?
If we just soum out of the UK and look more broadly, and particularly with an eye on the US given the pressure on TikTok now and the policy that affects potentially potentially closure of that business. Maybe in a few as sixty days, we'll see what happens in terms of the deal making around that business. Are you nap seeing any creators come moving over to your platform from TikTok?
Are you're attracting creators who are kind of migrating away from a TikTok and if so, can you give us some numbers on that front.
Yeah, so, we're definitely seeing creators wants to diversify, But I think this has always been a path for any creator, whether whatever platform they start their career on and garner their first audience on, they very quickly want to develop audiences across multiple platforms. And He's been offline as well, going into books or traditional media as an example. On the back of the recent youths, we've definitely seen an
increase in interest. There are a lot of people who are looking at developing fan based on Snapchat as well. What they're finding is the fan bases and the audience is that they're garnering on Snapchat tend to be it's a much more authentic and much more personal, much more
engaging type of audience. It's a different type of content that they need to create, but they are finding that the monetization, the ability to earn an income on Snapchat tends to be significantly more stable and better than some of the other platforms they've been working on. So we're very excited about the work we've done over the last eighteen months to be able to fuel that. And who
knows what happens with TikTok over in the US. I haven't heard anything happening in Europe, but we're still seeing an influx of creators in this region as well.