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Reports

Built from the filings

Long-form investigations from the public record: every figure taken from the accounts companies file at Companies House and checked against the filed PDF, with the fact-check ledger published alongside the story.

  1. UK civil engineering: roads and grids pay contractors what buildings don't

    Kier's highways arm keeps nearly 6p in the pound; the best building contractors fight for 4p. We mapped the 251 companies behind £18.7bn of Britain's roads, pylons and fibre — and why working for the state and the regulated utilities pays where building doesn't.

  2. UK data centres: the AI boom's engine rooms barely make money

    Stack Infrastructure's EMEA management company more than doubled its staff as the build-out accelerated; Global Switch's two London estate companies lost nearly £80M between them; Rackspace shrank again. The real profits sit with a derivatives record-keeper, a newswire archive and a very quiet CDN — because the boom pays landlords and builders before it pays hosts. We mapped the 193 hosting and data companies behind £9.4bn of turnover.

  3. UK drinks wholesale: stocking Britain's pubs is a 3p-in-the-pound trade — and the biggest supplier loses money

    Matthew Clark Bibendum, the giant of on-trade drinks supply, lost £12M on £891.9M of sales; William Grant's brands arm made £135.5M on £1.09bn in the same category. The margin is the business model, not the operator. We mapped the 156 drinks wholesalers behind £15.2bn of turnover.

  4. UK fashion retail: the mid-market chains bleed, the no-shop brands print money

    Matalan and New Look lost £122M between them running shops; Adanola, a Manchester athleisure label that sells almost entirely online, made £22M at a 26% margin — and Hermès grew 35% while the rest of luxury shrank. We mapped the 188 clothing retailers behind £35bn of turnover.

  5. UK gambling: Sky Bet makes more profit with 1,600 staff than Ladbrokes makes with 13,600

    Hestview — the company behind Sky Bet — cleared £156M with 1,583 people; Ladbrokes' betting-shop business needed 13,574 to make £147M. Casinos scrape 1–2% margins, a family-owned St Albans spread-betting firm out-earns every casino in the map combined, and the one physical format still growing is the slot arcade. We mapped the 111 gambling and betting companies behind £10.5bn of onshore turnover.

  6. UK grocery: on underlying profits, Tesco out-earns the rest of the supermarket industry combined

    Tesco's stores arm kept 3p of every pound and cleared £1.66bn — more than Sainsbury's, Aldi, Morrisons, Lidl, Waitrose, Iceland and Ocado Retail put together on underlying trading, once one-off disposal gains are set aside. Around them: buyout debt looming over Morrisons' thin margin, Lidl as the only giant still growing sales and staff at pace, and a tier of forecourt and Northern Irish independents quietly out-margining every supermarket. We mapped the companies behind £152bn of UK grocery.

  7. UK medical devices: a Berkshire breathing-circuit maker out-earns Medtronic's UK arm

    Intersurgical cleared £47.6M making respiratory kit — more than Medtronic's £690M UK operation. The global giants' UK margins are set in head office; the real economics live in mid-size British specialists printing 20–37%. We mapped the 184 medical-device makers behind £9bn of turnover.

  8. UK pharma manufacturing: the giants' margins are set in head office, not the market

    Ipsen's UK plant keeps 38p in the pound; Eli Lilly's UK arm keeps 6p — the difference is transfer-pricing arithmetic, not performance. The biggest name on the register doesn't make medicines at all. The real market signal sits in a mid-market of contract manufacturers and niche-medicine owners. We mapped the 155 companies behind £19bn of pharmaceutical manufacturing revenue.

  9. UK plant hire: the biggest fleets earn the thinnest margins

    Sunbelt's £680M UK operation cleared 2%; a Wigan trench-shoring specialist cleared 29%. In equipment hire the money is in the niche, not the fleet — we mapped the plant-hire companies behind £5bn of hire revenue as the infrastructure cycle cools.

  10. UK private hospitals: the companies that treat no patients keep the surest profits

    Spire's operating company booked £1.33bn and lost £41M before tax; the finance vehicle behind Durham's hospital kept a 46% margin. Across the 181 UK hospital companies that publish a full profit-and-loss, £10.3bn of revenue splits three ways — operators riding NHS waiting-list money, group layers of foreign parents, and PFI vehicles clipping availability payments — and the surest profits sit with the people who own the buildings, not the ones running the wards.

  11. UK pubs: the money is in the rent, not the beer

    Wetherspoon turns £2.1bn of pints and breakfasts into £81M with 42,000 staff; a propco in the Stonegate empire turns £162M of rent and tied-beer income into £108M with no employees at all. In between, buyout debt drinks whole estates' profits. We read the accounts behind £7bn of the UK pub trade.

  12. UK sports clubs: football burns a billion a year on purpose — the profits belong to the gyms and golf clubs

    Chelsea lost £256.7M, West Ham £108.8M, and the 150 sports-club companies that publish a full profit-and-loss lose £1.1bn between them — yet almost nothing here is distressed, because in professional football the owner's cheque-book is the business model and the loss limit is set by the league, not the market. The actual profits sit with a gym chain, Wimbledon and the members' golf clubs. We mapped the clubs behind £10bn of turnover.

  13. UK tour operators: the airlines took over the package holiday

    The three biggest names on Britain's tour-operator register are airline subsidiaries — Jet2holidays books £6.1bn, and easyJet holidays makes £250M on a third of that. We mapped the 140 companies behind £16.6bn of package travel, and the escorted-tour specialists quietly earning the best margins in the market.

  14. UK video games: the studio that owns its hit beats the armies working for hire

    Kinetic Games — 23 people in Southampton — cleared £45.5M of profit on one ghost-hunting game; Sumo's 1,641-strong co-development group booked a £59.3M loss, most of it write-downs after the industry's contraction. Around them: subsidiaries whose margins are set in California and Tokyo, a tax credit written into company names, and a register half-full of gambling firms. We mapped the 117 UK games companies behind £6.2bn of turnover.

  15. UK waste: collecting it loses money, burning it prints it

    The five biggest waste companies book £4.8bn of turnover and collectively make roughly nothing — Biffa's main trading company alone booked a £39M statutory loss. Four energy-from-waste plants book £318M and make £142M between them. We mapped the 404 waste and recycling companies behind £16.5bn of turnover.

  16. UK biotech R&D: losing money is the business model

    The typical UK biotech research company runs a −12% margin — and that's the model working, not failing: venture and grant money buys science, not profit. The firms that do print money aren't better drug developers. They're royalty vehicles, contract labs and multinational research arms wearing the same label.

  17. UK electrical contractors: the boom is real, the margins belong to the specialists

    TClarke wired £847M of work in its latest (15-month) accounts for a 1.9% margin; the specialists connecting wind farms, substations and data centres keep 10–19%. We mapped the 281 electrical-installation companies behind £13.3bn of Britain's most electrified trade.

  18. UK engineering services: selling hours has a ceiling — the profits belong to firms that own the kit

    Contractors on this map keep 1–3p in the pound, consultancies 5–15p, and the rare firms that own a product or a scarce specialism — fired heaters, energy consulting — keep 23–28p. Employee-owned Mott MacDonald anchors £15.6bn of engineering turnover otherwise crowded with the UK arms of American, Japanese, Danish and Irish groups.

  19. UK fashion wholesale: Chanel banks the world's profit in London — the other global brands' UK arms barely break even

    One London-registered company books £14.2bn of worldwide sales — well over half the entire category. Around it, the UK arms of Puma, Lacoste and On run wafer-thin, while British brand owners and licensees like Rab's Equip and Self-Portrait quietly keep 14–17%.

  20. UK film & TV: making the shows barely pays — owning them prints money

    Fremantle turns £367M of programme-making into a 1% margin, while Love Productions keeps a third of every Bake Off pound and Pinewood half of every stage-hire pound. We mapped the companies behind Britain's screen-production boom — and the per-show vehicles that make its statistics lie.

  21. UK freight forwarding: the giants keep 2p in the pound, the specialists keep 15

    Kuehne + Nagel bills £1.1bn in Britain and keeps £27M of it. Constantine moves fine art at a 15% margin; B&H flies aircraft parts at 13%. In a trade where turnover is mostly other people's freight, what a forwarder keeps is the only number that matters — we mapped the companies behind £15bn of freight management.

  22. UK management consultancy: the global arms book the billions, the mid-market keeps the margin

    Accenture's UK business turns over £3.7bn at a 3.7% margin; specialist advisers a fortieth of its size run at 25–40%. In a day-rate people business the profit sits where the partners sit — and a crowd of captives, payroll vehicles and mis-filed conglomerates wearing the consultancy label muddies every average.

  23. UK oilfield services: the basin shrinks, the service bill doesn't

    UK oil producers are shrinking three-for-one — yet the companies that drill, test, inspect and dismantle for them are growing two-for-one, and the plug-and-abandonment work of the basin's endgame is already landing as revenue. First, though, strip the £38bn headline: nearly half of it is LNG trading desks and overseas concessions that were never oilfield services at all.

  24. UK pharma wholesale: moving Britain's medicines pays 1–2%, everything around it pays ten times more

    Alliance Healthcare shifts £6.6bn of medicines a year at a 1.1% margin; Phoenix's network clears about 0.5% at the operating line. That's by design — NHS reimbursement is engineered to squeeze the middle. On the same shelf, drugmakers' trading arms and lean import houses keep 10–30p in the pound. We mapped the 272 UK-registered companies behind £47bn of medicine-supply revenue.

  25. UK plastics: own the product and keep the margin — mould for carmakers and work for them

    Marelli's UK arm lost £8.1M on £528.6M of car parts while Floplast turned 17.6% on drainage fittings and Balmoral Comtec grew 85% on subsea buoyancy. A rare map of mid-market British manufacturing that still pays — 314 plastics makers behind £10.5bn.

  26. UK property management: the giants are impostors — the real managing agents are mid-market, and being quietly bought

    The NHS's estate company, a housebuilder's buyout vehicle and an Army-garrison concession top the property-management map. The firms actually running Britain's blocks and buildings cluster at £30–90M on 10–18% fee margins — and consolidators are buying them. We mapped the 599 UK property-management companies behind £10.7bn of turnover.

  27. UK property trading: turnover is whatever sold this year

    Britain's biggest 'property trader' is a volume housebuilder — counted twice, at group and subsidiary, a third of the whole map. Beneath the mislabelled top sits the real trade: tenancy dealers and land promoters whose revenue is a diary of disposals, where +10,000% growth means one site finally sold. We mapped the 1,078 UK property-trading companies behind £16.3bn of turnover.

  28. UK shipping: a tanker owner you've never heard of out-earned BP's entire fleet

    Union Maritime cleared £150M at a 31% margin — roughly half of it gains on selling ships — with a tax charge of £452k, the tonnage-tax regime working exactly as designed. Around it: £1.8bn of Chevron tanker revenue producing £17M, a cruise line wearing a freight flag, and a container gamble that lost £216M in two years. We mapped the 244 sea-freight companies behind £21bn of turnover.

  29. UK telecoms: owning the network prints money, renting or digging one doesn't

    EE cleared £1.4bn running the mobile network it owns. Tesco Mobile kept £1.2M of the £1.1bn it books selling airtime it buys wholesale. TalkTalk lost £465M, and the challenger fibre builders are losing multiples of their revenue. We mapped the carriers, resellers, satellites and altnets on Britain's telecoms register.

  30. UK sports venues: football burns the money, the racetracks bank it

    Tottenham dropped £120M and West Ham £104M — the professional clubs on this map lost a combined £396M. On the same weekend crowds, the Jockey Club, Ascot, Goodwood and the Brands Hatch group all bank steady, near-double-digit or better margins, and the companies running your council pool are built to make nothing at all. We mapped the £7.7bn flowing through UK sports and leisure venues.

  31. UK advertising: the turnover league table lies — and the biggest 'agency' is Facebook

    Talon books £2.2M of turnover per head; Dentsu UK books £115k. Same line, opposite accounting — one passes client media money through, the other books only fees. We mapped the 250 UK advertising companies behind £16.7bn, starting by evicting Meta's UK arm from the table.

  32. UK building contractors: the profit belongs to whoever owns the land

    Wates put up £2.2bn of buildings and kept £1.3M. Bellway, building houses on land it owns, kept £227M. We mapped the 929 companies behind Britain's building sites — and the line that splits them.

  33. UK care homes: the profit is in the middle, not at the top

    HC-One, Britain's biggest care-home chain, has lost money three years running while family-owned Runwood cleared £59M at a ~31% margin. We mapped the 877 UK care operators behind £14bn of residential care — and the money sits with the mid-sized regional groups.

  34. UK fund management: three quant firms out-earn the rest of the top table combined

    Qube, Marshall Wace and Quadrature booked £2.4bn of profit with fewer than 1,500 staff between them — more than double the rest of the top twelve put together. Beneath them, boutique stock-pickers print 30–60% margins while the London arms of the global giants file cost-plus numbers.

  35. UK insurance broking: 30% margins in the shops, nine-figure losses at the top

    A good independent broker keeps 30p of every pound it books — which is exactly why private equity spent a decade rolling the trade up. The buyers' own accounts tell the other half of the story. We mapped the 453 companies behind £10.9bn of UK insurance distribution.

  36. UK IT services: revenue up, headcount down — the giants are squeezing more out of fewer people

    Cognizant, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce's UK arms all grew revenue while shedding staff — the defining pattern of the year. And the 'IT services' label shelters a fintech, a trading desk and PlayStation. We mapped the companies behind £158bn.

  37. UK property letting: the giants aren't landlords, and the real landlords barely employ anyone

    An asylum-accommodation contractor, a Toyota dealer group and Aston Villa's holding company sit at the top of the letting map. Strip the impostors out and the real business appears: 60–90% headline margins, hardly any staff, and a long tail of leveraged single-building companies. We mapped 2,252 UK letting companies behind £25bn of turnover.

  38. UK nurseries: the funded-hours land-grab is running at a loss

    Bright Horizons dropped £39M in the UK. N Family is burning a −32% margin to grow 41% a year. The French and Dutch consolidators are bleeding too. Only Busy Bees banks a real profit from Britain's nursery roll-up race — while well-run small operators quietly keep 25–37% margins.

  39. UK oil and gas: three producers shrink for every one that grows

    The windfall-tax-era North Sea is being harvested, not grown — and much of the £82bn booked by UK oil producers was never North Sea oil at all. Azerbaijan, Angola, Pakistan and Ghana barrels flow through London companies. We mapped the 347 producers that publish a full profit-and-loss.

  40. UK online retail: the household names lose money, the brands you've never heard of print it

    ASOS dropped £280M and Farfetch £357M — while Shein billed £2bn through a 91-person UK entity and mid-sized direct-to-consumer brands cleared 15–27% margins. We mapped the 258 UK online retailers behind £20.7bn of sales.

  41. UK private health services: half the £36bn is Bupa — and the margin tells you who's paying

    Britain's catch-all health category mixes an insurance giant, care homes, foreign medtech sales arms and a couple of hundred charities. Sort the 888 companies by what they actually do and the economics snap into place: NHS spinouts run at zero by design, commercial operators cluster in single digits, and a quiet tier of B2B specialists keeps 10–30%.

  42. UK schools: the giants run on state money, and the standout profit machine bills councils, not parents

    Academy trusts dominate the top of the ledger — £300M operations funded by grant, where a surplus isn't a profit. The standout money-maker is Witherslack, earning £47M schooling children councils can't place — just as VAT lands on the fee-paying tier. We mapped the 2,111 UK school companies behind £36bn.

  43. UK restaurants: the money is in the brand, not the dining room

    KFC's brand company keeps 35p of every pound and Domino's 13p — the median restaurant operator keeps 2p, and at national-rollout scale barely half a penny. Nando's is the great exception. We mapped the licensed-restaurant groups behind £15.8bn of UK dining.

  44. UK travel agents: turnover is an accounting choice — profit isn't

    TUI books £6.3bn and lost £68M; loveholidays books £317M and made £103M. Same product, opposite accounting. We mapped the 192 UK travel companies behind £18.5bn of booked revenue — and why the league table lies.

  45. UK general wholesale: the fatter the margin, the less it's a wholesaler

    Britain's catch-all wholesale category books £63bn — but it counts Costco twice, calls a seven-person semiconductor hub a £1.2bn trader, and hides a cluster of export vehicles growing 400% a year. Strip the misfiled and real distribution economics emerge: 1–7% margins, defended hard.

  46. UK property development: the label hides housebuilders, landlords and a supermarket

    The volume housebuilders — Taylor Wimpey, Bellway, Persimmon — are growing again. But the category they sit in also bundles Network Rail, an opticians chain, a convenience-store group, and a swarm of single-scheme companies whose 80% margins are rent, not building. We sort them out.

  47. UK road freight: the parcel networks print money, contract logistics doesn't

    DPD clears ~£200M a year delivering parcels; Wincanton lost tens of millions running other companies' warehouses. Same roads, opposite economics. We mapped the haulage, logistics and parcel companies behind £43bn of UK freight.

  48. UK software: the real SaaS firms run 60–90% margins — when you can find them

    Software is the highest-margin business we've mapped: the genuine product companies clear 60–90% profit. But the 'biggest software firms' include a travel agent and an umbrella-payroll group. The trick is telling the product companies from the resellers and the impostors.

  49. UK electricity generation: a few giants, and a thousand single-asset SPVs

    Most 'electricity generators' are really one wind farm wearing a company. Their 40–90% margins are a financing artifact, not operating brilliance — while the big integrated generators just saw revenue fall a quarter as the energy crisis unwound. We map both.

  50. UK diagnostic imaging is two industries wearing one name

    NHS-contracted scanning loses tens of millions; private-pay clinics in central London run at 40% margins and grow 50% a year. Same label, opposite economics. We read the accounts of the operators you can actually see — and explain why most of the market is invisible.

  51. The 'executive search' label is four-fifths not executive search

    'Executive search' is a label that sits over a market mostly full of contract and gig staffing. The real search firms are a small, well-bred pack at the back — running 23–68% margins, clustered in legal and finance. We separate the label from the reality.

  52. UK hotels: branded-budget and London-luxury are winning; the middle is thin

    Whitbread and Travelodge print money at the budget end; central-London hotels run 25–31% margins on room rates the rest of the country can't touch. In between sits a long, fragmented tail of single-site hotels at single-digit margins. We read 1,100 companies' accounts.

  53. UK new-car sellers: £153bn of turnover, about 1% of it profit

    Selling new cars is a pass-through business — the dealer books the full price of the car as revenue and keeps a sliver. The only double-digit margins in the sector aren't car retail at all. And the fastest growth is Chinese and EV brands buying UK share at a loss.

  54. UK recruitment is in a cyclical recession — and the numbers show who's surviving

    Half of Britain's recruiters shrank last year; a third are loss-making; the global staffing brands are all in the red in their UK arms. We read 751 companies' accounts. The survivors share one thing — and it isn't size.

  55. UK temp staffing is a balance-sheet business, not a fee business

    Read a temp agency's accounts and you smell payroll plumbing, not recruitment. A 0.9% margin is the model working as designed. We read 299 companies' accounts — who's quietly profitable, who's grinding, and the one disruption idea worth copying.

  56. The £9bn car-finance scandal is already showing up in lenders' accounts

    Everyone reports the FCA's £9.1bn estimate. The true cost is written in the lenders' own filings: a £1.25bn combined profit swing across 17 exposed lenders, a negative-equity bailout at Britain's biggest car lender, and the first group to quit the UK over the scheme.