The Upwards Trend of the Outsourced Facility Service Industry in Germany and Austria

Abstract

The Facility Service (FS) industry is a growing industry. A study (Redlein and Stopajnik 2019) showed that the FS industry grew faster than the rest of economy in Germany and Austria between 2008 and 2016 in terms of value added and employees. To get a better understanding of this development further analysis are necessary: The influence of part time workers is not yet clear and it is not yet clear if the development of value added is driven by personnel costs or profits. Furthermore, it is necessary to investigate which specific FS activities led to that increase. To answer these questions EU statistics and European norms are used: The European standard EN 15221-4 lists all services that can be considered FS. Eurostat lists economic activities on a detailed level. Those activities are matched with the activities of the EN 15221-4. The selected items of statistics from Eurostat are used to determine the FS industry. As measures full-time equivalents, wages and salaries, personnel costs and profits are selected next to valued added at factor cost and the number of employees. Based on this approach, the development of the FS industry is analysed. To make a comparison possible the FS industry is set into relation to the whole business economy for each measure. Results show that in Austria and Germany high increases can be registered in the FS activities cleaning, janitoring, building installations and security. Results show that the FS industry grew faster than business economy in terms of full-time equivalents. In Germany, there were no decreases for any FS activities in terms of profits, value added, personnel costs or wages and salaries. In Austria some FS activities such as steam and air conditioning supply, water treatment and supply showed slight decreases.