Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:11 pm on 3 October 2017.
He’s fallen into a trap there, set for him by the UK Government, because what has happened is that the methodology has changed, so that—if I remember rightly—if you have a factory in Wales that is exporting, but its headquarters are in England, it’s counted as an English export. That’s the problem. So, all of a sudden, we see these sudden changes in the export figures, not because physically fewer goods are being exported, but it’s because they’re counted as having come from England because their headquarters are in England. We know that many organisations in Wales that manufacture don’t have their headquarters in Wales.
He asks a question: what are we doing to boost our presence overseas? We are moving ahead with a strategy to do just that. The balance that has to be struck is between: do you boost an existing office or do you open a new office? We commissioned work from the Public Policy Institute for Wales; they gave us information as to how we should approach that. Over the next few months, Members will hear of new office openings and, of course, boosting of staff abroad in order to make sure that we boost our presence, working quite often with the Department for International Trade—in fact, most often with DIT—but in those markets where Wales has a strong presence and needs to strengthen its presence in the future.