Foreign Companies Provide Every 5th Job in Austria
A new statistic examines the question of how many jobs in Austria depend on foreign companies and what share these companies have in the Austrian economy. Read on if you want to know more!
21% of employees in Austria are employed by foreign companies. / Picture: © Wikimedia Commons / Gugerell / CC0
How much do Austrian jobs depend on foreign companies? A new statistic investigates this question by examining how many companies were under foreign control in 2020 and how many jobs these companies generate.
Statistics Austria, which published these statistics, came to the conclusion that a total of 12,500 companies were under foreign control in 2020. This corresponds to around 3.5% of all companies recorded in Austrian economic statistics in 2020.
Conversely, Austrian companies had around 6,700 subsidiaries abroad in 2020, mainly in Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
The importance of foreign-controlled enterprises for the Austrian economy is underscored by their share of 21% of employees and 33% of sales revenues in the market economy sector.
The average size of a foreign-controlled unit in 2020 was 51 employees, while it was 8.4 for the total number of enterprises. The increase in the number of foreign-controlled entities (+6.7%) compared to 2019 is mainly due to the improved coverage of indirectly controlled entities in the statistics.
This increase mainly includes smaller entities and thus has little impact on the number of employees and turnover. In 2020, foreign-controlled entities achieved 9% lower turnover and had 2% fewer employees than in the previous year.
This was roughly in line with the development of the overall economy in Austria in that year. By far the most important country of control for units in Austria - measured by the number of employees - was Germany, followed by Switzerland, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands and France.
Around 70 % of the units had the owner:inside or the group headquarters within the EU.
The number of foreign subsidiaries of Austrian companies changed by just under 12 % in 2020 compared to the previous year; however, this is also primarily due to the improved recording of indirectly controlled units.
While there was an increase in the number of employees (+8.1 %), sales revenues were 13.4 % below the level of 2019. In terms of target regions, Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary continued to be the most important target countries for Austrian foreign settlements. In the year under review, expansions were recorded primarily in Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, and by number of employees also in the USA, Switzerland and Turkey.