Scotland’s national economic development agency, Scottish Enterprise, is celebrating delivering a record set of results over the last financial year, helping to grow both businesses and the Scottish economy.

Working with over 1,300 companies between April 2023 and March 2024, the agency secured over 16,700 new jobs for the country. This includes over 9,000 jobs from inward investors to Scotland—which the agency noted is the highest number achieved in the last five years.

Support provided to firms last year also helped unlock £1.9 billion of capital investment spend in Scotland, £2.15bn in planned exports, and over £449 million in business innovation investments. This represents some of the best annual results ever achieved by businesses and entrepreneurs working with Scottish Enterprise.

The news was announced as Scottish Enterprise chief executive Adrian Gillespie and deputy first minister Kate Forbes visited the new drug manufacturing site of Scots firm Symbiosis, where a £4.3m Scottish Enterprise grant for the company was unveiled.

Speaking on the agency’s work, the latest results, and the Symbiosis funding, Forbes said: “These impressive results show how the agency is building on its strong record of success by unlocking thousands of new jobs and global growth opportunities to achieve a more successful, greener and fairer economy.

“Scottish Enterprise plays a key role in our National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which has bold and ambitious actions to make Scotland’s economy more sustainable and resilient in the longer term.”

“This support for Symbiosis is just one example of how Scottish Enterprise is targeting key areas – in this case the life sciences sector – to bring significant capital investment and improve manufacturing, boosting exports,” Forbes also said.

Stirling-based Symbiosis provides manufacturing services to global biotech and pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines and drug therapies for use in clinical trials and commercial sales.

The new funding contribution has been made to help accelerate the growth of the scale-up business by doubling its existing footprint in Stirling, and creating 50 new highly-skilled jobs over the next few years.

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Gillespie, on Symbiosis and Scottish Enterprise, also remarked: “Symbiosis is a brilliant example of our long-term support in action, helping unlock the company’s international growth potential and support its innovation and investment to maximise global economic opportunities.”

“These are outstanding results that demonstrate Scottish Enterprise is helping businesses right across Scotland drive up levels of innovation, international activity and investment to build a fairer, greener and stronger Scottish economy.

“Such a successful year requires considerable effort and huge aspiration from the companies we work with, our partners, and our own teams at home and overseas. I’m pleased that last year’s performance has also helped lay the foundations for the introduction of our new missions-based approach this year, with almost 60% of new inward investment jobs last year coming from the energy transition sector.

“Identifying energy transition opportunities, along with increasing levels of capital investment and productivity, and maximising innovation to drive up the number of scaling businesses, are our long-term areas of focus to drive economic transformation in Scotland.

“We want to work with many more companies that share Symbiosis’ ambition to secure billions of pounds of investment for our economy and create thousands of new jobs over the next decade.”