Pimec brings to Madrid its request for a law to incentivize business growth

BarcelonaPimec has brought its request for a state law that "rewards business growth instead of penalizing it" to Madrid this Wednesday. The president of Pimec, Antoni Cañete, assured during an event in the state capital that there are entrepreneurs who want to gain scale and who "find themselves with a new obligation, a new administrative burden, or a higher cost precisely when they make the leap." He also warned that "small business size hinders competitiveness in Spain." At the same time, a Pimec report—which includes 348 interviewed companies—shows that 45.3% of companies have not received any aid in the last five years to favor their growth.

In a statement, Pimec asserts that the new regulation should address administrative and regulatory simplification, taxation that incentivizes investment and reinvestment, access to financing, professionalization, innovation, talent, and internationalization, as well as facilitating mergers, acquisitions, and business alliances. Pimec also calls for "reviewing" the regulatory thresholds linked to company size, especially those associated with companies with 50 and 250 employees, to prevent increases in staff from leading to "abrupt jumps" in regulatory obligations. Likewise, the employers' association proposes "advancing" towards an "effective" single business window, improving interoperability between administrations, and ensuring that companies do not have to provide the same document more than once.

For Pimec, the "problem" is not that the Spanish state has too many SMEs, but "the difficulties they encounter in growing and gaining scale, a fact that limits the number of medium and large companies." The Catalan employers' association details that large companies only represent 0.14% of companies in the State, a level that remains below other European countries such as Germany, which has 0.47% of large companies among its firms, three times more than Spain. With a smaller business size, the gross value added per worker in the State stands at 42,841, compared to the 51,718 euro average in the European Union. "The difference is especially marked among micro-enterprises, precisely the segment with the greatest weight in the Spanish business fabric," says Pimec.

Although 74.6% of companies expect to expand their activity in the next five years, according to the Pimec report, only 35.2% claim to have managed to grow "successfully" in the last five years, while 39.8% have been able to grow "with difficulties".