[20] Typical industry areas include: digital and creative, financial, legal and business services, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, environmental technologies, tourism, global sports brands, media and real estate.

The city is also a key location for many foreign owned companies and headquarters, and almost half of the Northwest's Top 500 businesses.

Compared with other NUTS 3 city areas in the UK, Greater Manchester South ranks 4th, behind London (£75,100), Edinburgh (£54,100) and Leeds (£46,900).

[10] 2excluding Manchester, included Newcastle, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol and Birmingham According to the 2012 Eurostat figures, GDP per capita (in euros) of Greater Manchester is = €27,500 just ahead the West-Midlands with €26,600 but only half the GDP per capita of Dublin[31] €56,671, London with €54,200 or Paris with €60,100.

[36] The 2011 Census also showed that between 2001 and 2011, the population of Manchester grew 19%, making it the fastest growing area in the UK outside London.

International property experts Cushman & Wakefield have ranked Manchester as the best city to locate a new headquarters operation largely down to ease of access to a pool of knowledge and global connectivity.

Manchester's ability to host major headquarter offices has been recently proven by the action taken by the BBC to move significant parts of its operation to MediaCityUK on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal in Salford and Trafford, by the growth of shared service centres for Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and the Royal Bank of Scotland, and by the presence foreign language back-office teams serving more than 20 different markets.

[44] Manchester is the preferred distribution hub for global companies like Adidas, Argos, Kellogg's, L'Oreal, Office Depot, Procter and Gamble; and major logistics firms such as Kuehne & Nagel and Wincanton.

Following the decision by Beijing Engineering Construction Group to invest in Manchester's Airport City, freight and distribution firm DHL has agreed to relocate major operations to the site.

[48] The site is also home to Trafford Park EuroTerminal, a rail freight terminal and a large container depot.

Future enhancements of the site are entailed in the proposed £50 billion Atlantic Gateway, which could be one of the most expensive and expansive development projects in UK history.

It would involve the creation of Port Salford, an inland freight terminal accessible to the Irish Sea via the Manchester Ship Canal.

[49] In 2011, Manchester's financial and insurance sector was worth £3.22 billion, the 3rd largest in the United Kingdom after London and Edinburgh.

[52] Some notable operations in the city include the Royal Bank of Scotland, who employ 7,000 people in Manchester following a rising trend in nearshoring from London.

[52] The Co-operative Group, the world's largest consumer-owned business with large banking and insurance operations was founded in Manchester in 1844.

[53] The Bank of New York Mellon opened its Manchester headquarters in 2005, and since then has expanded to over 1,100 employees and added a second office in Spinningfields.

[54] Spinningfields is a large new business district west of Deansgate that will serve as home to several headquarters, squares, and cafes.

The Shambles includes Harvey Nichols, Marks & Spencer, and Selfridges stores, as well as a number of designer boutiques.

The markets provide food and drink into the evening extending the use of the city centre and lending a friendly spirit to Christmas shopping.

[73][74] Under government plans, Manchester Piccadilly will be connected to London Euston via High Speed 2, a high-speed railway, by 2033.

[75] The city is served by the UK's largest light rail network, the Metrolink, which stretches from Bury, Oldham and Rochdale in the north to Salford, Eccles to the west, Manchester Airport and Altrincham in the south and Ashton-under-Lyne to the east.

Manchester is the only city in the UK to offer next generation fibre optic broadband speeds up to 200 Mbit/s, and serves as a testbed for new technologies.

Being at a central location in the UK, all primary telecom carriers and fibre optic networks converge through Manchester, making it a principal access point for the North of England.

Outsourcery, the UK's leading provider of cloud computing solutions and mobile-centric Unified Communications to SMEs, is headquartered in Manchester.

Several hosting and colocation providers such as UKFast, Daisy Group and Datacentreplus have invested in new data centres in Manchester to support cloud computing.

Manchester is also home to a burgeoning community of digital companies, specialising in fields as diverse as SEO (search engine optimisation), web design and online PR.

[86][circular reference] Manchester has a range of restaurants, bars, and clubs, spanning the famous "Curry Mile" in Rusholme to traditional ‘grub’.