Four bespoke sectors using Companies House data (South Yorkshire)

What’s this?

• A series of South Yorkshire maps of four bespoke sectors based on machine learning from companies’ own website text (code). They cover advanced manufacturing, health tech, clean energy and defence.
• Firms with 10+ employees were used. Of those 3661 businesses, 1565 (42.6%) had websites validated against the firm’s postcode - these went into the learning algorithm. See the table below for the numbers on the source data extracted from Companies House accounts.
• Those 3661 firms with 10+ employees are only 11% of total firms, but have 65% of employees. So the firms going into this cluster data cover about 30% of employees in Companies House data for the last year.
• All maps use standardised z-scores for ‘likelihood of belonging to this sector’ for comparability. So e.g. a z-score of 1 or more puts a firm in the top 16% for that sector.
• There are two kinds of map here.
  • 1. The z-score for each sector. Each hex shows the average z-score for that zone, weighted by employees per firm.
  • 2. Bivariate maps of the same sectors showing the low/medium/high weighted z-score alongside where has relatively low, medium or high employee counts.
• Note, each map uses the same hex zones (1km across) - these are the places in South Yorkshire that have at least 25 employees per hex, for those 1565 businesses.

Combined those two can be useful - e.g. for clean energy, the z-score map shows two hexs north of Doncaster centre; the bivariate map for the same sector shows a zone with a high z-score, but relatively low employment

Table: Companies House firm stats, data for last year up to Dec 2025

Firm size	Count	Percent of firms	totalemployees	employeepercent
1	13097	38.8%	13097	6.4%
2-4	13539	40.1%	33985	16.7%
5-9	3428	10.2%	22225	10.9%
10-20	1962	5.8%	27129	13.3%
21-50	1139	3.4%	35272	17.4%
51-100	353	1%	24717	12.2%
101+	207	0.6%	46828	23%

Four sector maps

Sector score vs employee count maps