Company, enterprise, production hall – illustrative photo.
Prague – The number of companies and self-employed people has more than doubled to 2.98 million since the creation of the Czech Republic. In the last 15 years, the share of commercial companies has been increasing, which usually create more added value than sole proprietors and thus contribute to economic growth. This follows from the analysis of the Chamber of Commerce (HK) of the Czech Republic, which is available to ČTK.
Advertisement'; }
Entrepreneurs have long been the majority of all business entities. They reached the highest share in 2005, when it was 73 percent, since then it has decreased to 64 percent. On the contrary, in the last 15 years, the share of trading companies has been growing. According to HK, this is related to the increase in the attractiveness of the Czech Republic in the eyes of foreign investors and to the fact that successful entrepreneurs are expanding their activities and therefore creating companies. Reducing bureaucracy is also important.
Trading companies can create more gross added value than sole proprietors due to the scale of their business. The increase in their share in the total number of business entities is therefore positive news with regard to the performance of the entire economy, the chamber said.
She also highlighted the fact that a significant part of business companies in the Czech Republic are small and medium-sized companies with up to 250 employees. “They are more flexible than larger companies, because they can react more quickly to changes in the market. And thus they have a positive effect on large companies to introduce innovations and make production more efficient. At the same time, even the most successful company in the market environment cannot do without smaller suppliers, ” said the president of HK Vladimír Dlouhý.
In the last 30 years, the structure of the economic sectors in which Czech entrepreneurs operate has also changed. As in the past, the processing industry is of greatest importance, but its weight has decreased, with 23.2 percent of business entities operating in it, while in the early 1990s it was 31.5 percent. The share of companies operating in agriculture, forestry and fishing also decreased significantly. Currently, they make up only two percent of all entrepreneurs, while at the time of the breakup of Czechoslovakia it was 7.9 percent.
On the other hand, the biggest increase is in the field of information and communication companies, where the share of companies in the sector increased by 5, 8 percentage points to 6.9 percent. There has also been an increase in entrepreneurs in health and social care, where 5.8 percent of business entities operate today, while in the early 1990s it was 2.6 percent.
