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Celebrating our Top 500 Businesses
Boots has topped a new index of the biggest businesses in the East Midlands.
The high street health and beauty giant claimed top spot on the list, after registering a turnover of £6.837bn in the year to August 2017, when its latest publicly available accounts were published.
It was also the region’s second largest employer, with more than 40,000 members of staff registered in that year.
Top of the list by employee numbers was clothing retailer Next, which employed 43,970 people in the year to January 2018, and registered a turnover of just over £4bn.
Next came in at number five of the East Midlands Top 500 index, with the Sytner Group, Barratt Developments and Pendragon respectively occupying the remaining top five positions.
The East Midlands Top 500 Companies is a new index which celebrates the business success of the East Midlands as a region with a remarkably strong, diverse and resilient range of firms.
These businesses are at the heart of the East Midlands economy and are high on the list of those most likely to drive growth and create jobs in the future.
Their prosperity affects not only their workforces, supply chains and the communities around them, but ultimately everyone in the region.
For the first time, the index enables us to see the range and strength of the leading businesses in the East Midlands, in the three counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire covered by the Chamber.
The index is part of a proposed new approach for sharing business intelligence to support economic development across the region.
The East Midlands lacks a single organisation which brings together economic and business intelligence.
This puts the East Midlands at a disadvantage with city-regional unified authorities, such as the West Midlands, which are able to integrate shared intelligence much more effectively, for example via the Chambers’ network, Black Country Economic Intelligence Unit and WMREDI institute.
While the East Midlands is a partner in the Midlands Engine Economic Observatory, it also needs to develop its own capacity for business intelligence which can inform policymakers such as the Local Enterprise Partnerships, the All-Party parliamentary Group of East Midlands MPs, and the East Midlands Development Corporation, as well as individual businesses and communities.
The Index builds on the Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire ‘Top 200 Companies’, featured annually on Reach Media’s
