Small Business Sentiment in the United Kingdom decreased to -84 in the second quarter of 2020 from 36 in the first quarter of 2020. Small Business Sentiment in the United Kingdom averaged -4.79 from 1978 until 2020, reaching an all time high of 40 in the second quarter of 1983 and a record low of -84 in the second quarter of 2020. In the United Kingdom, the Small Business Sentiment measures measures the expectations of business conditions for companies with up to 199 employees. The Questionnaire accesses the overall sentiment regarding general and export business situation, investment, capacity, order books, employment, output, stocks, prices competitiveness regarding domestic, EU and non-EU markets and innovation and training. For each assessment is computed a sub-index as the percentage of positive answers minus the percentage of negative answers. The composite index is then computed as the weighted average of the sub-indices. An Optimism Index of +100 indicates that all survey respondents are much more confident about future prospects, while -100 suggests that all survey respondents are much less confident about future prospects. An index level of 0 indicates neutrality. This page provides the latest reported value for - United Kingdom Small Business Sentiment - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

Claer Barrett wants to hear readers’ experiences of accessing business interruption loans

Your chance to grill FT experts on the government’s rescue measures for small businesses

English companies with shared offices excluded from coronavirus rescue package

Resist the temptation to rely on networks. Plus: practical tips for recruiters

The recruitment process in the industry is slowly starting to turn more professional

Behind the Money is a podcast from the Financial Times that takes listeners inside the business and financial stories of the moment, with reporting from FT journalists around the world. You can find Behind the Money wherever you get your podcasts, including FT.com/behindthemoney.

Mauren Pereira's drapery business was on track for its most financially successful year to date. That was until the coronavirus outbreak reached Virginia. Behind the Money reports on how one small business owner is navigating the current economic crisis. With Brendan Greeley, US economics editor for the Financial Times. 

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Behind the Money is a podcast from the Financial Times that takes listeners inside the business and financial stories of the moment, with reporting from FT journalists around the world. You can find Behind the Money wherever you get your podcasts, including FT.com/behindthemoney.

The Trump administration’s small business bailout programme has been plagued by problems from the start, with complaints that large companies crowded out the kinds of small enterprises and independent contractors it was designed to help. With a fresh round of funding on offer from Washington, we hear from several business owners trying to get their share, as well as the FT’s Laura Noonan who has been reporting on the programme since it launched. 

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Laura Noonan and Lauren Fedor respond to your queries on the state of SBA rescue funds

How best to celebrate Chekhov's 150th anniversary? Sky Arts 2 have chosen to mark the occasion with "chekhov: comedy shorts" - four one-act plays transposed to the small screen, with a cast of well-known comedians including Johnny Vegas and Steve Coogan. But do they make good television? In this week's arts podcast, Neville Hawcock, the FT's deputy arts editor, talks to the paper's theatre critic, Sarah Hemming, and television columnist, John Lloyd, about the venture.  

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Is it acceptable for an artist to have his work produced by others? And what are the implications of the artist as businessman on conceptual art as we know it? As a new generation of artists openly declare themselves marketing men, FT arts editor Jan Dalley discusses the business of art with Jackie Wullschlager, FT visual arts critic, and Peter Aspden, FT arts and culture writer.  

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Smart speakers don’t yet have the skills to

Readers say they fall between the cracks of government support schemes

The Russian billionaire on working with Putin, his Premier League plans and making a fortune in the 1990s

Boxer’s ideas don’t have to make sense — he just has to hit people

Industry highlights bottlenecks in access to materials that are a possible Covid-19 treatment

Adam Neumann transformed shared offices but failed to charm stock market investors

Small-cap stocks underperformed large-caps throughout the bear market and rally

Smaller companies in ‘epic rally’ on optimism over coronavirus and policy support

Legislation cuts taxes for some enterprises while increasing VAT

FCA warns failure to act could count against provider’s regulatory record

His 19% in 1992 was best result for independent presidential candidate in 80 years

Tag Heuer’s digital chief sees connected watches as a point of entry to the mechanical models

The holes in the investment case were there, but not many were looking

In today’s news: UK warns it would be ‘irresponsible’ to discuss easing lockdown. Spain sets out plan to lift its own tough measures. Donald Trump signals a halt to his daily media briefings as US death toll accelerates.

Countingup, the business current account that “automates” your accounting, has raised £4 million in self-described bridge funding. Leading the round is ING Ventures, with co-investment from Triple Point, CVentures, and BiG Start Ventures. Founded by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, and now boasting 20,000 business customers, Countingup’s long term vision […]

For many college seniors, school is a time for self-exploration, considering options, leisurely contemplating the future. Yet that’s rarely the case for computer engineering students who either attend the world’s best universities or rise to the very top of their classes. Almost immediately after choosing their courses during the first week of school, they typically […]

No surprise, really, that 5G smartphone sales are on the way up. Frankly, there’s really no other way to go, according to the latest numbers from NPD’s Mobile Phone Tracking. The firm noted that 5G handsets accounted for less than 1% of total sales in the U.S. The hurdles are also what you’d expect: namely, […]

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Samsung said it expects the COVID-19 pandemic to continue impacting its business for the rest of the year, cutting into sales for smartphones and TVs, but increasing demand for PCs, servers and memory chips as people continue to work or study from home. Samsung’s results for the first-quarter of […]

While human travel has become severely restricted in recent months, the movement of goods has remained a constant priority — and in some cases, has become even more urgent. Today, a startup out of Switzerland that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport one item in particular — pharmaceuticals — is announcing […]

Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some […]

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a […]

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for […]

Despite the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, global smartwatch shipments continued to grow during the first three months of the year, driven by online sales, says a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics. Shipments grew 20% annually to reach 13.7 million units in the first quarter of 2020, up from 11.4 million units […]

Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and other smartphone companies have received approval from some state governments in India to partially resume manufacturing and assembling of devices amid the ongoing lockdown in the world’s second largest handset market that completely shut operations at these plants in late March. The companies said that they have secured permission to […]

At its annual Universe conference today, Microsoft -owned GitHub announced a couple of new products, as well as the general availability of a number of tools that developers have been able to test for the last few months. The two announcements that developers will likely be most interested in are the launch of GitHub’s first […]

The chancellor need beware that policies introduced in a crisis are hard to end later

India has emerged as one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the last decade, reporting growth each quarter even as handset shipments slowed or declined elsewhere globally. But the world’s second largest smartphone is beginning to feel the coronavirus heat, too. The Indian smartphone market grew by a modest 4% year-over-year in the quarter […]

Despite the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, global smartwatch shipments continued to grow during the first three months of the year, driven by online sales, says a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics. Shipments grew 20% annually to reach 13.7 million units in the first quarter of 2020, up from 11.4 million units […]

Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and other smartphone companies have received approval from some state governments in India to partially resume manufacturing and assembling of devices amid the ongoing lockdown in the world’s second largest handset market that completely shut operations at these plants in late March. The companies said that they have secured permission to […]

If you find voice assistants frustratingly dumb, you’re hardly alone. The much-hyped promise of AI-driven vocal convenience very quickly falls through the cracks of robotic pedantry. A smart AI that has to come back again (and sometimes again) to ask for extra input to execute your request can seem especially dumb — when, for example, […]

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for […]

Government clarifies report that 400,000 garments were unusable

Even though Rohit Prakash was a dual MD and PhD researching optogenetics at Stanford University, his entrepreneurial itch kept returning him to his family’s small business roots. He and his co-founder Nipul Patel began researching the travails of small business owners, interviewing countless entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what their risks were or what caused […]

Every year, our Japanese-language sister site throws a big Disrupt-like event in Tokyo where there is, of course, a Battlefield between about 10 different startups. With north of 100 million Internet users, Japan has a considerable domestic market. While Western companies have had more success in Japan than in mainland China, the national startup scene still has tons […]

We knew it was going to be bad — but not necessarily “lowest level since 2013” bad. As Apple was busy reporting its earnings, Canalys just dropped some of its own figures — and they’re not pretty. After two quarters of much-needed growing, the global smartphone market just took a big hit. And you no […]

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for […]

Would you pay with a “Google Card?” TechCrunch has obtained imagery that shows Google is developing its own physical and virtual debit cards. The Google card and associated checking account will allow users to buy things with a card, mobile phone or online. It connects to a Google app with new features that let users […]