Catalan technology breaks records and bills more than 30,000 million

BarcelonaThe technology industry has become one of the central pillars of the Catalan economy. The economic figures of the ICT sector (information and communication technologies) have grown non-stop in the last decade, according to the 18 editions of the annual barometer published by the Cercle Tecnològic de Catalunya. The latest edition records an unprecedented business record: in 2025, the Principality's technology companies surpassed 30.6 billion euros in turnover. This represents an increase of 13% compared to 2024, when the previous ceiling was also broken with more than 28 billion euros in revenue. Last year's total is equivalent to 9.1% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), half a point more than the previous year.

According to the evolutionary analysis of the Cercle Tecnològic, which is almost two decades old, Catalan ICT has practically doubled its economic activity in the last 10 years, from just under 16 billion euros in revenue in 2015. And the industry does not expect to slow down: of the more than 1,000 companies consulted by the institution to prepare the barometer, more than 76% expect to increase their turnover in 2026; and only 2.1% see a downturn as possible.

The new business pace has also expanded the Catalan technological workforce at a similar rate. According to the barometer, in the first quarter of this year, 166,000 technology workers have been reached in the country, double that of a decade ago. Technological employment has grown at a rate nearly four times higher than that of the Catalan economy as a whole, which has expanded by 28% in the same period. With this step forward, ICT professionals now represent 3.76% of the entire Catalan working population, a ratio that exceeds the European Union average, which stands at close to 3.6%.

Bigger and more productive

The ICT industry also moves away from the country's private sector as a whole in one of the most problematic areas, according to Catalan employers' associations: the size of companies. According to the Cercle's report, Catalonia has gained eleven companies with more than 1,000 employees in the last 10 years, bringing the total to 13 established in the territory. To these must be added about thirty more with between 200 and 999 employees.

On the other hand, the ratio of companies with fewer than 10 employees is much lower than in the economy as a whole: 77.5% of technology companies are micro-enterprises, and the global average is 94%. In total, the country has 17,384 ICT companies, of which more than 6,500 have employees.

The size of the analyzed companies grows in parallel with their productive capacity, which, according to the barometer, is substantially higher than that of Catalan companies as a whole. According to the document, the gross value added (GVA, an indicator of a sector's economic activity) per worker in the Catalan ICT sector exceeds 85,000 euros, well above the 66,500 euros per person registered on average in the country. It should be noted that the computed value shows a decrease compared to the maximum of 90,000 euros per worker reached in 2020.

The mystery of AI

The document points out that companies are already noticing a certain impact from the artificial intelligence-based applications they are beginning to adopt. More than three-quarters of the country's technology companies assure that AI will be the technology "with the greatest impact on business in the coming years". In fact, more than 56% of those consulted assure that they are already generating revenue where it has been applied.

However, from the Circle, they deny that, for now, AI applications are causing a generalized increase in productivity. The organization's president, Joan Ramon Barrera, qualifies the progression: according to the expert, there is still time to correctly assess the impact of artificial intelligence on business, because for now it has not yet been extensively applied to specific business processes. "Is adopting Copilot in an organization applying AI? Yes, but reading PDFs in three minutes has no impact on business," he reasons. Companies, in this sense, would be "testing how the technology can be useful" for their processes and training their employees in the most relevant applications.

The Barometer also does not capture, for now, a destruction of jobs due to automation. "It is perceived more as a transformative technology than a substitutive one," assure from the organization, which calls to "adopt skills, redefine profiles, and incorporate AI with strategic criteria".