The UK's Advanced Manufacturing Data Gap — And How We Closed It
Advanced Manufacturing is one of the UK’s most important industries, and one of the hardest to track. The government has committed billions to the sector as part of its Modern Industrial Strategy, identifying it as one of eight critical IS-8 growth sectors. Despite its importance, there’s no definitive list of the companies that make it up. The data gap is clear, and for anyone trying to work with the sector, it matters.
Why data has always been the problem
The problem starts with SIC codes. Standard Industrial Classifications were designed to reflect the economy as it once was, not as it is today. Whole industries that define the modern economy don’t fit neatly into them, and Advanced Manufacturing is a particularly extreme case.
The government’s own Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan concedes this. Its SIC-based definition of the sector is explicitly described as a proxy. It even acknowledges that Advanced Materials (one of six frontier industries within Advanced Manufacturing) cannot be meaningfully represented using the SIC system at all.
That breadth is part of the problem. Advanced Manufacturing isn’t one industry, it’s a number of different elements under one roof, each with its own supply chains, company profiles, and innovation patterns. Unfortunately, no SIC code captures that.
The result is that the teams that need this data most (local authorities, national agencies, economic development organisations, for example) have had to build their own rough proxies. By stitching together SIC codes, keyword searches, and custom tagging, teams can get an approximation of the landscape, but it is time-consuming, inconsistent, and misses companies.
How we closed the gap
We’ve grown our Advanced Manufacturing coverage from a few hundred to over 12,500 companies, built through deep human research and curation, combined with proprietary machine learning. Every company has been individually assessed against a precise, consistent definition: any company that develops, produces, supplies, or uses advanced science and technology within manufacturing processes.
This is how we build all 315 of our Industries and Buzzwords classifications, across 4.6m companies. The result is a dataset that reflects the modern economy, not a decades-old classification system. We believe it now gives you unrivalled visibility of the UK’s Advanced Manufacturing sector.
From theory to practice
For organisations working across government, economic development, and research, the practical difference is significant.
Spot clusters: See where Advanced Manufacturing activity is actually concentrated and map it against the government’s own investment priorities.
Track policy impact: Measure how funding programmes and interventions are landing across the sector over time.
Speak the same language: One consistent, properly-defined dataset that teams across departments and institutions can work from, rather than competing proxies that produce different answers to the same question.
Follow the companies that matter: Build a pipeline, monitor a portfolio, or track a region. Understand which businesses in the sector are growing, raising, and scaling.
“Advanced Manufacturing is one of the most exciting sectors in the UK economy, and the hardest of the IS-8 to crack — existing taxonomies (especially SIC) are simply too out of date to capture it cleanly, and there wasn’t a suitable alternative. It was the last sector in the Modern Industrial Strategy where the data really wasn’t there. Thanks to the work across our R&D teams, we’ve finally closed that gap.”
Jon Hopkins, Data Product Manager
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