What assessment has the Cabinet Minister made of a) the rate at which businesses in Wales progress from micro to small, small to medium and medium to large enterprises, and b) the principal barriers preventing Welsh businesses from scaling up?
The Welsh Government does not hold analysis that directly tracks the rate at which individual businesses in Wales move between size bands, such as from micro to small, small to medium, or medium to large enterprises.
However, wider business demography data provides some indication of change in the overall composition of the Welsh business base. This suggests the number of medium-sized businesses in Wales increased between 2019 and 2025, and that medium-sized firms accounted for a slightly larger share of the Welsh business population over that period.
In relation to the barriers preventing Welsh businesses from scaling up, research by Economic Intelligence Wales and the Scale Up Institute points to a range of factors. These include leadership and management capacity, succession planning, workforce and skills shortages, awareness of available business support, access to finance and credit constraints, low growth ambitions among some small and medium-sized enterprises, and wider structural factors affecting the Welsh economy. Recent Economic Intelligence Wales research has also highlighted weaknesses in succession planning among many Welsh SMEs. This underlines the importance of long-term business planning and organisational capacity in supporting sustainable growth.