Policy makers and the world of finance, numerous institutions and associations, but also most German citizens are well aware of the importance of small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) for prosperity and employment in Germany. Therefore, the demand for data and facts on SMEs is so high that the Federal Statistical Office has now compiled the most interesting pieces of information from its numerous statistical analyses into a concise and comprehensive data collection which is available on the internet but also in the form of a PDF file.
This collection provides data from the processing industry, trade and hotel industry, from the fields of transportation, telecommunications as well as other fields of the service sector. According to statistics experts, the data collection in question takes into account about 80% of all businesses.
Among the issues presented in this collection are e.g. the criteria according to which businesses are classfied into small, medium-sized and major companies, the importance of SMEs as well as structural differences between the different business categories. 