Lawyers, accountants, management consultants and other professional-services grunts are drawn to London partly for the same reasons financial-services firms cluster there the global ubiquity of English and a time zone midway between the rich old world and emerging Asia.

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Supply chains are global, but firms that make similar things cluster together, like those spindlemakers in Poole.

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It was meant as a simple write-up about a research project trying to map the global cross-ownership of public companies and revealed a cluster of 147 firms that dominated the whole.

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