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The chemical industry is one of the UK’s largest manufacturing industries with a turnover in excess of £50 billion.
- It invests the equivalent of 10% of sales on research and development
- It spends over £2 billion a year on new capital investment.
- With exports of £31.8 and imports of £27.3 billion, it is the manufacturing industry’s number one exporter, with an annual trade surplus of just under £5 billion.
- Over the last decade it grew more than five times faster than the average for all industry.
In the UK, the chemical industry provides direct employment for 214,000 people and supports several hundred thousand additional jobs throughout the economy. Those workers directly employed in the industry are among the most productive in Europe.
This is however only part of the story.
Chemistry underpins over half the UK economy through important disciplines such as process technology, chemical engineering, product development and formulation, chemistry is vital to major industry sectors such as pharmaceuticals, personal care and argochemicals. These chemistry-using industries account for over £700 billion in global sales (see diagram).
Gross value-added (GVA) is an important measure of a sector's contribution to the overall economy. GVA for the chemistry-using industries represents over 50% of the total GVA for UK Plc.
The chemistry-using industries also directly employ >2.3 million and indirectly support >5 million specialist and support service jobs in the UK.
click here to learn more about the Trends and Drivers affecting the chemistry-using industries >
(from figures for the top 850 UK companies representing over 60% of total sales of the top 850 UK companies [£1200 bn] - analysis based on the 2007 R&D scorecard produced by BERR/DIUS)
Definition of GVA:
Gross Value Added (GVA) measures the contribution to the UK economy from an individual producer, industry or sector in the United Kingdom. It is used to estimate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is a key indicator of the state of the economy. In the UK, three theoretical approaches are used to estimate GDP: 'production', 'income' and 'expenditure'. When using the production or income approaches, the contribution to the economy of each industry or sector is measured using GVA.
How does GVA relate to GDP?
The link between GVA and GDP can be defined as:
GVA (at current basic prices; available by industry only)
plus taxes on products (available at whole economy level only)
less subsidies on products (available at whole economy level only)
equals GDP (at current market prices; available at whole economy level only).
or, in summary:
GVA + taxes on products - subsidies on products = GDP
Produced by the Office for National Statistics
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