Ranstad Research | After more than a year of crisis, signs of recovery are beginning to be seen. And this is happening not only in employment increases or decreases in registered unemployment, but also in the number of companies with employees, a variable also published by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. The number of businesses with employees in April – these figures are published with a month’s delay – totalled 1.39 million, which means a year-on-year increase of 44,000 compared to April 2020. This is particularly true in the segment of businesses with 2 to 5 workers, where the rise was 26,515.
But the number of firms is still far from the pre-crisis situation. Just before the start of the crisis, in February 2020, the number of companies stood at 1.48 million, i.e. 89,000 more than today. This loss represents a drop of 6% in the number of businesses, specifically concentrated in the micro-SME category: the decline in the amount of firms with 5 or fewer employees was almost 73,000.
If the comparison is made with April 2019, in order to avoid seasonality, the situation is even worse, since the fall in the number of companies is 7.6%, with a reduction of 115,014 companies with employees.
