From left to right: Yolanda Gómez, vice-president of the Association of Economic Journalists (APIE in its Spanish acronym); Elena Pisonero, director of the project and president of Hispasat; Yolanda Fernández, technical director of the project and and Rafael Domenech, head economist of the BBVA Research./ Picture: Círculo de Empresarios.
The Diplomat. Madrid.
Size is important when talking about companies. According to the Report of the Spanish Medium Enterprise, more than 500,000 jobs could have been saved in Spain during this crisis “if the distribution of employment in the companies for size was in Spain similar to the one in the United Kingdom”, where 4 out of 1,000 companies are big companies. In Spain that percentage is reduced to one out of a thousand.
The problem is that the Spanish business tissue, because of the reduced size of its companies, “is very vulnerable during the crisis phases”, the report explains. Besides, it adds that this predominance of small companies, of less than 10 employees, reduces productivity “because it is there where the negative breach of productivity in relation to the EU is the highest”. In other words, the countries with the biggest companies achieve, in general terms, a higher working productivity.
To improve the productivity levels of the Spanish economy and achieve a sustainable growth, the report suggests, as a necessary condition, to have a “source” of medium enterprises “that also have a better presence in the most productive sectors, which allows them competing in the international markets and having capacity to innovate”.
The Spanish medium enterprises are, precisely, the ones registering the highest profits, higher than those of big companies, and the ones that could increase their foreign turnover until positioning it in a third of the total sales, a proportion similar to the companies of more than 250 employees.
Medium enterprises from the industrial sector are the ones that showed a greater increase of the foreign sales ratio to the total sales and in the sector of services the greatest foreign sales ratio was registered to the total, higher than the one of big companies.
Half of the big companies are innovative compared to 35% of the medium enterprises and 23% of the small ones
However, the report confirms, that the percentage of innovative companies is increasing significantly when these are bigger and especially in the case of exportations. Half of the big companies can be considered as innovative, compared to 35.5% of the medium enterprises developing innovative processes and to 23.6% of the small ones.
The last data available of INFORMA show that 2012 can be classified as the year of the companies’ survival, because of the biggest reduction of the business tissue and the most pronounced deterioration of results. Anyway, the medium enterprises that survived have a greater dimension and they are more productive.
The Project of the Spanish Medium Enterprise, which was started two years ago, develops a series of lines of work, such as monographic analysis, debates, forums with experts, analysis of successful cases, and this Annual Report, whose second edition was presented yesterday in the Círculo de Empresarios of Madrid, in collaboration with the APIE. The Spanish Statistical Office (INE is its Spanish acronym) and the BBVA research have collaborated to carry out this analysis.
The Círculo de Empresarios presented the first report in April “Top 50 of the Spanish medium enterprise” which is classified within the framework of the aforementioned project. It identified the 50 companies obtaining the best punctuation in an index made up of three ratios: productivity, operative margin and economic profitability.
Read the complete text here:
Informe 2014 Empresa Mediana Española
