The national economic development agency secured over 16,700 new and safeguarded jobs, including a five-year high of over 9,000 jobs from inward investors.

Support provided to businesses last year also unlocked £1.9 billion of capital investment spend in Scotland, £2.15bn in planned exports, and over £449 million in business innovation investment.

The news was unveiled as Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes and Scottish Enterprise chief executive Adrian Gillespie visited Symbiosis’ new drug manufacturing site in Stirling to announce a £4.3m Scottish Enterprise grant for the company.

The funding contribution will help accelerate the growth of this ambitious scale-up business by doubling the company’s existing footprint in Stirling and creating 50 highly skilled new jobs over the next few years.

Symbiosis provides manufacturing services to global biotech and pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines and drug therapies for use in clinical trials and commercial sales. It has committed over £26m to a three year project to grow the company, which includes the creation of a new, state-of-the-art automated sterile manufacturing facility to expand the services it offers to its customers globally.

Kate Forbes MSP said: “This support for Symbiosis is just one example of how Scottish Enterprise is targeting key areas – in this case the life sciences sector – to bring significant capital investment and improve manufacturing, boosting exports.

“These impressive results show how the agency is building on its strong record of success by unlocking thousands of new jobs and global growth opportunities to achieve a more successful, greener and fairer economy.

“Scottish Enterprise plays a key role in our National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which has bold and ambitious actions to make Scotland’s economy more sustainable and resilient in the longer term.”

Mr Gillespie said: “These are outstanding results that demonstrate Scottish Enterprise is helping businesses right across Scotland drive up levels of innovation, international activity and investment to build a fairer, greener and stronger Scottish economy.

“Such a successful year requires considerable effort and huge aspiration from the companies we work with, our partners, and our own teams at home and overseas. I’m pleased that last year’s performance has also helped lay the foundations for the introduction of our new missions-based approach this year, with almost 60% of new inward investment jobs last year coming from the energy transition sector.”

He continued: “Identifying energy transition opportunities, along with increasing levels of capital investment and productivity, and maximising innovation to drive up the number of scaling businesses, are our long-term areas of focus to drive economic transformation in Scotland.

“Symbiosis is a brilliant example of our long-term support in action, helping unlock the company’s international growth potential and support its innovation and investment to maximise global economic opportunities.

“We want to work with many more companies that share Symbiosis’ ambition to secure billions of pounds of investment for our economy and create thousands of new jobs over the next decade.”

Scottish Enterprise made an equity investment in Symbiosis in 2011. The latest £4.3m grant funding will assist the company’s plans for international growth as it aims to increase its presence in North America and Europe.

Symbiosis chief executive Colin MacKay added: “The Symbiosis facility expansion project, directly facilitated by the long-standing support of Scottish Enterprise, will provide additional world-class sterile biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity to our clients globally from our new site in Stirling.

“This will support the continued high-growth trajectory of Symbiosis and create new highly skilled life science sector jobs in Scotland. Additionally, the new facility will bring direct long-term economic benefit to Scotland to reflect the successful export-focussed strategy of Symbiosis.”

The new facility’s capabilities will complement the company’s existing sterile manufacturing facility, also in Stirling, which was used during the Covid-19 pandemic to support the supply of life-saving vaccine quickly to clinical trials in the UK. The new site will enable manufacturing of a range of medicines, including anti-cancer drugs and innovative advanced gene therapy products for use around the world.