Sir James Dyson, the billionaire inventor, has said there is no reason for businesses in Britain to be uncertain as a result of the EU referendum and that they would be mad to withhold investment on the back of the vote.

Speaking as his company, Dyson, unveiled a £250m expansion of its research and development centre in the Cotswolds, the engineer said Britain could now reach trade agreements with countries outside Europe “much more easily and flexibly” and reconsider its approach to immigration from around the world so it can attract more engineers and scientists from India, China and the far east.

Dyson was one of the most prominent business leaders to publicly support Brexit before the referendum in June. His company has developed from a firm specialising in bagless vacuum cleaners into a fast-growing multinational technology company selling bladeless fans, air purifiers, hand-dryers, hairdryers and robotic vacuum cleaners.



In the past four years the company’s sales have doubled. Dyson reported revenues of £1.7bn in 2015, up 26% year on year, with profits of £448m. It is investing £5m a week in research and development.

Dyson said he could not understand why businesses would stop investing because of the prospect of import duties being introduced on trade between the UK and Europe.

Asked whether the economic uncertainty in the UK could hold Dyson back from investing, he said: “I don’t want to be arrogant about this, but I don’t understand why people are uncertain. I think it is something put around. If you are a business, do you actually say, ‘I am not going to make a decision to invest in that factory or I am not going to make a decision to set up in Europe because of this potential 3% [tax].’ As a business, are you actually stopping and not investing because of that? If you were, you would be mad because currency can move 10% in a couple of days. A 3% import duty is not something to worry about.

“It is highly unlikely it will come in anyway. The imbalance of trade is £100bn a year. Are you seriously saying that Germany wants to be putting an import duty on British goods going into Germany when we can punish them much greater on their goods?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

“The trend is towards free trade. The failure of Europe to negotiate a free trade agreement with America, the TTIP, is really worrying. That is uncertainty. If you are waiting for Europe to negotiate free trade agreements China, North America and so on, that is a far greater uncertainty then whether or not you pay 3% to go into Europe.”

Dyson’s latest investment involves the opening of a new research building at its campus in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. The building, nicknamed D9, will house up to 450 engineers working on top-secret projects. These projects involve work on robotics and battery technology, two key new areas for the company. There are now 2,500 people working at the site out of 7,000 Dyson employees globally.

Europe accounts for around 16% of Dyson sales and is still an “attractive” market for the company, its founder and chairman said. However, the business is growing faster in China, South Korea and Japan and Dyson said that Europe was not a single market for his company anyway.

“It is not a single market as far as we are concerned,” he said. “There are different plugs, different languages, different boxes, different instructions, different laws, different national characteristics, different psychology, different marketing and different companies.”

Dyson insisted that leaving the EU is positive for the UK despite warnings of a slow down in the economy. “It is a positive because we can now negotiate trade agreements with countries much more easily and flexibly on our own then we ever could with 29 countries in Europe,” he said. “We don’t have those problems, we are on our own, we can negotiated a very rapid trade agreement with other countries.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dyson’s HQ. Photograph: WilkinsonEyre & Dyson Research Ltd

The 69-year-old also said it was opportunity for Britain to address a shortage of engineers in the country by making its immigration system global.

Dyson said: “It has been very much a Europe-focused immigration system, not a global immigration system. A lot of people who want to be engineers come from India, China, and the far east. In Pune [India] there are 40,000 engineers that come out of Pune University every year, which is twice as many as the British [engineers] that come out of the whole of British universities.”

“We just don’t have the scale. China produces something like 2 million engineers a year, we produce 20,000. We are just not going to compete globally unless we seriously ramp up the number of people.”

The entrepreneur played down criticism from Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, that business executives would rather be playing golf on a Friday afternoon than negotiating export deals.

“I don’t think many businesses survive nowadays if you spend your time playing golf,” he said. “What I have been saying is that to compete globally and to export now it is a technology race. If companies aren’t developing technology and this country doesn’t produce enough engineers to take advantage of all the wonderful universities and commercialise their technology we will lag behind economically and be outstripped by our competitors all over the world.”

An experimental approach

Dyson has become the UK’s nearest equivalent to Apple. It develops cutting-edge technology, is renowned for sleek design and has even opened its own shop on Oxford Street in London.

The new £250m extension at its 56-acre campus in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which is unveiled today, could even help Dyson take on Apple directly. Government documents revealed earlier this year Dyson is working on a battery-powered electric vehicle, although the company refuses to confirm the project. Apple is also rumoured to be working on an electric car.

Founded in 1993, Dyson is a young company in more ways than one. The average age of its staff is just 26, a deliberate attempt by founder and chairman Sir James Dyson to try to keep the company on its toes. Dyson’s headquarters is designed to feel like a university campus and even has a sports centre nicknamed “the hangar”.

“This is going to sound wrong , but we don’t like experience,” he explains in a rare interview at Dyson’s headquarters. “Experience can be inhibiting. I would rather have a naive, flexible, experimental, pioneering approach, because we want to do everything differently. It is a lot easier if people don’t come along – and this is going to sound slightly nasty – with baggage, and experience with how things are done. We want to find a new and better way of doing things. Graduates are very good at doing that.”

Max Conze, the chief executive of Dyson, who joined in 2010 from Procter & Gamble, said the company’s growth is built on a “bet on young people, young graduates” and a “belief in technology and innovation as the engine for growth”. He added: “You have to be willing to listen to people who have just come in and the people who have done this for many years.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dyson’s headquarters are designed to feel like a university campus.

Dyson’s headquarters are shrouded in mystique and secrecy. From the road, the only evidence of the cutting-edge work that is taking place is a lonely blue airsock bearing its logo. The campus is hidden behind lines of trees.

The new D9 research building is a futuristic two-storey structure with reflective glass that offers no sign of what the engineers inside are up to. The company has 129 laboratories for its research and development team, who are working on more than 200 projects.

Dyson appears to be on the cusp of major expansion. Its revenues have doubled in the past four years and it wants to double its team of 3,000 engineers by 2021, with £1bn committed to developing new battery technology.

The company’s new robotic vacuum cleaner – the Dyson 360 Eye – is a new avenue. After initially specialising in the movement of air, Dyson has broadened its technology into robotics, electric motors and 360-degree cameras. These technologies would clearly be helpful for an electric vehicle. “I don’t think we could deny that,” Dyson says. “But we don’t talk about what we are doing.”

The inventor still owns 100% of the company and is estimated to be worth £5bn – more than Sir Richard Branson.

Dyson says he has no plans to sell a stake in the business and that its private ownership has been key to its success. “Our CEO can think long term, he doesn’t have to satisfy the newspapers or investorsevery quarter he is raising the profits. We can afford to invest more in research and development, invest in long-term stuff.”