Growth prospects for SMEs ‘encouraging’

This year will likely be a turning point for EU SMEs, with total employment in small and medium sized businesses expected to increase by 0.3% and value-added by 1% as compared to last year.

Antonio Tajani, European Commission Vice President with responsibility for Industry and Entrepreneurship, said: “Our initiatives to help SMEs to make it through difficult times have paid off. After five years of sluggish development, I am glad to see that SMEs are about to grow again. They are also starting to recruit more staff. Moreover, our indicators make it clear that SMEs can grow further in 2014. SMEs are the lifeblood of our economy as they are now dragging us out of the most severe crisis of EU economy in the past 50 years.”

Preliminary forecasts expect the positive developments to further accelerate in 2014. This year is expected to be the first time since 2008 that there is a combined increase in aggregated employment and value-added of SMEs in the EU.

In 2012, SMEs suffered job losses of 610,000 or a 0.7% decrease compared to 2011. Moreover, SMEs’ contribution to GDP declined by 1.3% from €3.44 trillion in 2011 to €3.39tr in 2012.

The 20.4 million European SMEs are mostly micro-enterprises and employ approximately 86.8 million people in 2012. This represents 66.5% of all European jobs for that year; micro-enterprises provide just under a third of that total employment figure. The SME sector as a whole delivered 57.6% of the gross value added generated by the private, non-financial economy in Europe during 2012.