Ever since the Brexit referendum, stories about businesses leaving London for Dublin, Paris, or Frankfurt have been a constant feature in the news cycle. But behind the headlines and soundbites, the actual mechanics of relocation—who moves, where they go, and what it really means—are more complex. It’s a challenge that lands squarely in the lap of analysts and policymakers, who need to distinguish rumor from reality. This is where the quiet discipline of ISIC codes steps in, offering a way to see these transitions as they actually unfold.
At first glance, company relocations look simple: a firm announces it’s shifting its headquarters, and the move is either made or it isn’t. But, as anyone who’s tracked these moves knows, things are rarely that straightforward. Some companies register new branches in the EU but keep decision-making in London. Others move a handful of executives, update an address, but leave most operations behind. The devil, as ever, is in the details.
ISIC codes provide the connective tissue for tracking these changes. By focusing on sectors that are particularly exposed—finance (ISIC 6491), pharmaceuticals (ISIC 2100), and others—it’s possible to monitor official business registries across both the UK and the EU. When a company that was previously headquartered in London appears in the Brussels or Dublin registry under the same ISIC code, it’s a signal that something substantive may be happening.
Of course, the work doesn’t end there. Not every address change represents a real relocation. Analysts need to distinguish between permanent headquarters moves and more tactical branch registrations. Sometimes, a company creates a nominal presence in an EU city just to maintain market access, even as the main board and staff remain in the UK. In other cases, the shift is unmistakable—senior leadership, legal domicile, even the accounting functions follow the new registration.
The process is equal parts forensic investigation and pattern recognition. A single data point—a new ISIC 6491 entity in Paris, for instance—could mean little. But if, over several quarters, you see a steady uptick in ISIC 2100 companies shifting their headquarters addresses from the UK to continental Europe, the picture starts to sharpen. Supplementing registry data with press releases, employment filings, and even property records helps flesh out whether a move is real or window dressing.
It’s also worth considering the direction of these flows. Not all relocations are one-way. Some firms hedge their bets, maintaining dual headquarters or splitting operations across cities. Others, after a year or two, quietly scale back their EU presence, consolidating back in the UK or moving on to a third country. These dynamics complicate the tally, but they also make the analysis richer—reminding us that, for many firms, relocation isn’t an event but a process.
None of this is perfectly clean. Business registries update at different speeds, and not all firms are diligent about classifying themselves under the right ISIC code. There’s also the perennial challenge of companies operating under complex holding structures, making it difficult to pin down where the “real” headquarters actually sits. Yet, for all these limitations, the ISIC-based approach allows for a degree of comparability and rigor that anecdotes and press reports cannot match.
Ultimately, the act of tracking relocations through ISIC codes is less about producing a final scorecard and more about equipping policymakers, investors, and communities with a clearer sense of how the economic map is shifting. Sometimes the biggest changes aren’t the headline-grabbing exits, but the slow, cumulative movements that only become visible when the data is mapped and revisited, again and again.
It’s in these quieter, ongoing shifts that the real story of post-Brexit economic adjustment is written. And while no classification scheme can capture every nuance, ISIC codes—combined with curiosity and patient analysis—go a long way toward making sense of a landscape in motion.