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Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.

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Dimension	Cardiff & South WalesWales	Liverpool City RegionNorth West	Birmingham & the West MidlandsWest Midlands
Sectors	Semiconductors, Advanced Materials, Creative Industries Supporting: Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Digital Technologies	Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries	Mobility & Transport Technology, Advanced Manufacturing, Quantum Technologies, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Digital Technologies, Defence & Security
Research	Cardiff University Swansea University	University of Liverpool Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine	University of Birmingham University of Warwick WMG
Companies	South Wales compound semiconductor cluster	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. Compound semiconductor fabrication and research facilities, materials and coatings research, production studios.	Not recorded on the map. University research institutes, automated chemistry facilities and port and logistics assets.	Energy Systems Catapult UK Battery Industrialisation Centre Automotive research centres, battery and vehicle test facilities and major logistics assets.
Capital	Public and corporate capital dominate; venture funding is limited by capital intensity.	A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate.	Corporate and supply chain finance dominate; venture capital is thin relative to industrial output.
Government programmes	Wales Investment Zone designations — Investment Zones	Liverpool City Region Freeport — Freeports	West Midlands Investment Zone — Investment Zones
What exists	The UK's compound semiconductor cluster, combining research, fabrication and supply chain, alongside steel and coatings materials research, and a significant screen production economy.	Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation.	The largest manufacturing base in the UK by employment, automotive and electrification engineering, rail and mobility research, and a young, large working-age population.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Design demand. Fabrication capability needs a pipeline of UK customers designing products that use it, and capital patient enough for semiconductor timelines.	Translation capacity: strong discovery science with limited local scale-up manufacturing and limited early-stage capital to hold companies in the city region.	Ownership of the value in electrified vehicles: battery, power electronics and software increasingly sit outside the region and outside the UK. Innovation-active SME supply chains are under-capitalised.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	South Wales fabrication connected to Bristol and Cambridge chip design and to defence, automotive and energy customers who currently source overseas.	Infection and biologics research connected to North West and Teesside biomanufacturing capacity, with the port used for export rather than only import.	Midlands manufacturing paired with battery and power electronics research, North East battery production and Coventry testing capability as a single electrification value chain.
UKIZ relevance	Compound semiconductors are a genuine national specialism with a fragile ownership base. The proposed Wales mission focuses on keeping the value chain here.	Discovery and manufacture sit unusually close together here. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography.	The region's transition depends on owning the new value in a vehicle rather than assembling someone else's. The proposed Midlands zone focuses on batteries, power electronics and software.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

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