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Editorial Autumn 2021

Editorial by EARSC's Secretary General Emmanuel Pajot

Emmanuel Pajot

Despite Covid, the EO Industry market continues its growth!

The publication of the EARSC Industry Survey is a milestone for the association. Initially published every other year, EARSC started in 2020 to publish a shorter survey in between. Based on numbers directly gathered from EO companies and monitoring of European EO companies performed by the Secretariat, the EARSC Industry Survey has a bottom-up approach. This year, the Industry Survey covers the 2020 pandemic period, a stressful period for companies. When we interviewed our members in March/April 2020, they shared they didn't have an accurate forecast on sales after six months-time. This Industry Survey provides a first snapshot of the short-term effect, which must be taken with caution not to extrapolate with a longer-term impact.

Four key numbers characterize the Industry Survey:

The number of companies: the identification of new EO companies is a challenging exercise. The number of companies increased by 24% compared to the previous survey reaching 713. If some may not have been identified in 2019, this still represents the sector's overall growth.
The number of employees: the EO downstream Industry represent a pool of 11,600 jobs, up from 9800 in 2019, i.e. a 17% growth for the two successive years. Amongst the changes, we see a higher contribution of initially non-EO companies such as GI ones incorporating now EO into their business services.
The total revenues in the sector in 2020 is 1,71b€ representing a growth rate of 25% over the last 12 months. The most significant share comes from small companies, whereas the most extensive growth comes from medium-sized companies.
The growth rate: the 5-year CAGR has been sustained at 10% since 2013.

In terms of markets, the domestic market share decreased a bit, illustrating the capabilities of European companies to sell services abroad. On the international market, the Middle East market presents the highest growth. An exciting message demonstrating the success of European companies to find new customers and develop user acceptance.

Further to the publication of this Industry Survey, we will now start the upcoming one. I would like to warmly thank the 150 companies that contributed to this achievement, sharing their numbers.