Birth, Survival, Growth and Death of ICT Companies

Abstract

As part of the EURIPIDIS (European innovation Policies for the Digital Shift) project, a joint project with DG CONNECT, IPTS investigates the birth and survival rates of ICT companies and compares it to the whole economy. This report uses the most recent available data from the Business demography dataset gathered by Eurostat. From this data, ICT constitutes a small fraction of European companies (4.6% of all companies in 2011) and the European economy (4.8% of employed in these companies in 2011) but the number of ICT service companies is growing. The majority of European national economies have experienced a growing number of ICT companies between 2008 and 2011. ICT companies tend to have higher survival rate than non-ICT companies. And finally, ICT sector tends to have a higher fraction of companies that are high growth companies than non-ICT sectors