INTERNATIONAL TRADE
Capital of capital: Zurich is Switzerland’s financial centre and most populous city. Nearly one-third of its 400,000-plus residents are foreign nationals
from a barn in rural Cheshire. After husband-and- wife team Karl and Lindsey Bond began distilling from their kitchen table in 2014, a chance meeting with a distributor for Swiss department store Globus led them to start exporting their gin to Switzerland. “Quality is everything to the Swiss,” says Karl Bond. “They’re not a nation that would seek out a chain pub, for instance. The market’s definitely there for high-end British food and drink.” The strength of Switzerland’s economy does have its drawbacks if you’re a foreign firm seeking to recruit here. The average net monthly salary is £4,015, compared with £1,993 in the UK. “Because Swiss salaries are high, it means that the rates we charge here are higher than in the rest of Europe,” says Richard Gledhill, who co-founded digital consultancy Geodesic in Zug in 2018, having worked in Switzerland for nearly two decades. Switzerland’s mountainous wages do present an opportunity, though: domestic firms are seeking to cut their labour costs with tech such as robots. McEvoy believes that the UK’s “expertise in smart manufacturing and AI could definitely help them”. Switzerland is no technological slouch itself. It has been the world’s most innovative country for the past nine years, according to an annual index published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University and Insead. Marieke Hood, head of Swiss Business Hub UK and Ireland, highlights the fact that “Switzerland invests more than three per cent of GDP in research and development, while 60 of its higher education institutions have close links with the international research community. The R&D opportunities here are great for British companies.”
A QUESTION OF SERVICES
‘Switzerland invests more than three per cent of GDP in research and development. The R&D opportunities here are great for British companies’
Royal green: Sir David Attenborough’s interview by the Duke of Cambridge was one of the highlights of Davos 2019. The veteran naturalist urged delegates to treat the planet with ‘respect and reverence’
Given that several large supranational bodies are based in Switzerland, including eight specialised agencies of the UN, there is growth potential for British service providers here too. London-based fintech company Ebury is one such business. The firm established its first Swiss office near Zurich in 2016 and is now looking to set up in Geneva. “This move makes sense,” says Tom Davies, partner in charge of Ebury’s Swiss operations. “Geneva is one of the world’s NGO capitals and it’s a big hub for commodities businesses.” Services comprise 52 per cent of Anglo-Swiss trade, so their omission from the continuity deal has drawn criticism. Despite this, McEvoy believes that British service providers “should have no concerns about operating in Switzerland. Existing service-related agreements, such as the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, sit within the citizens’ rights agreement.”
Signed in February 2019, the rights agreement, which covers British citizens in Switzerland and Swiss citizens in the UK, would apply in any Brexit scenario, including a no-deal withdrawal. While the IoD notes that an orderly Brexit with a transition period would pose few problems to British service providers in Switzerland, Claudia Catelin,
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