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How many Enterprise businesses are their in the United Kingdom and Europe?
Hello! Thanks for your question about the number of enterprise businesses in Europe and the United Kingdom. The most useful sources I found to answer your question are the databases of Eurostat and the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics.
The short version is that, after searching extensively through the databases of Eurostat, the UK ONS, OECD, and Hoovers, I have determined that the number of businesses in the UK and Europe with more than 1,000 employees is not publicly available. This is because Eurostat defined SMEs as those businesses with less than 250 employees and large businesses as those businesses with at least 250 employees. Based on information from Eurostat and UK ONS, there are around 9,690 and 262,648 large businesses in the UK and European Union, respectively.
Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
To answer your question, I first checked if the Eurostat database has your desired information. Eurostat, the main source of European statistics, has structural business statistics which classify businesses by employment size class. However, I saw that there were only 4 size classes used, namely, 0 to 9 employees, 10 to 49 employees, 50 to 249 employees, and 250 or more employees. It is not possible to determine from the database the number of businesses with more than 1,000 employees. (I understand that you and my colleague agreed that enterprise businesses be defined as those businesses with more than 1,000 employees). Also, the statistics are for the European Union only not the whole of Europe.
When I checked the database of the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics (ONS), I found that the employment size classes used are consistent with those used in the Eurostat database. The same can be said with the OECD database.
Hoovers has a company search facility where companies can be filtered by the following number of employees: <4, 5-10, 11-49, 50-99, 100-499, 500-999, 1000-4999, and 5000+. However, for the purpose of answering your question, I did not find it reliable. I saw only 28 companies located in the United Kingdom in Hoovers' database.
I tried searching directly for the number in Google, but I did not find any helpful source other than the databases I previously mentioned. World Bank's Databank was not helpful too.
Below you will see the number of large businesses in the UK and European Union based on information I have gathered from Eurostat and UK ONS and on Eurostat's definition of a large business. According to Eurostat, large businesses have 250 or more employees while small and medium-sized businesses have less than 250 employees. I assume, based on the additional context provided in the request, that by 'enterprise businesses' you meant large businesses.
NUMBER OF LARGE BUSINESSES IN THE UK
According to the UK ONS, the yearly number of businesses in the country with 250 or more employees is as follows:
I got the numbers by setting the following variables of the dataset "UKBABa Enterprise/local units by 2 Digit SIC, Employment size band and Region" to:
Entity Type = Enterprise
Employment Size Band = 250+
NUMBER OF LARGE BUSINESSES IN EUROPE
1. Out of 23,377,006 non-financial businesses in the European Union (28 countries) in 2014, there were 44,245 non-financial businesses with 250 or more employees.
This is based on the latest available data from the following table:
Number of enterprises in the non-financial business economy by size class of employment (tin00145)
which can be found in the following directory:
Data Navigation Tree > Tables by themes > Industry, trade and services > Structural business statistics (t_sbs) > SBS - main indicators (t_sbs_na)
2. There were 26,264,751 businesses in the European Union (28 countries) in 2014.
This is based on the latest available data from the following table:
Business demography main variables - NACE Rev. 2 (B-N excluding K64.2) (tin00170)
which can be found in the following directory:
Data Navigation Tree > Tables by themes > Industry, trade and services > Structural business statistics (t_sbs) > Business demography statistics - all activities (t_bd)
Unfortunately, there is nothing in the database that indicates the number of financial and non-financial businesses with 250 or more employees. The 44,245-number mentioned above includes only non-financial businesses.
Nevertheless, I learned from Eurostat's definition of SME that "small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses in the EU." Since we know that there were 26,264,751 businesses in the European Union (28 countries) in 2014, we can estimate that 1% of these or 262,648 were large businesses.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, while the number of businesses with more than 1,000 employees is not publicly available, the number of businesses considered large in the European Union is 262,648. In the UK, it is 9,690.
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