Business growth in Malaga keeps the province in top spot in Andalucía

Malaga ended 2024 with 58,255 companies registered with Spain’s national social security system. No other Andalusian province has a greater number of companies. Malaga’s productive fabric is the most abundant in the region. The province’s figure is therefore higher than that of Seville, which closed last year with 56,547 companies. These are data published on Tuesday this week by IECA (Andalucía’s institute of statistics and cartography), which also shows that over 20% of the companies in the region – one in five – are from Malaga: the province has 58,255 companies of the region’s total of almost 269,000.

The figures published by the IECA also reveal the final round-up for the year just gone. In Malaga by the end of 2024 there were 763 more companies than 12 months earlier. This growth is, to begin with, lower than that recorded in the previous three years as the rise in 2023 was over 1,150 companies, that of 2022 was 778 and that of 2021 was close to 2,500 companies. It also implies a lower rate of growth than in other provinces: in percentage terms the increase in Malaga is limited to 1.3% compared to 9.5% in Jaen and 3% in Cordoba, although it still beats the rate of company creation in Seville (0.9% in the last year).

On the other hand, Malaga’s increase in the number of companies is based exclusively on two sectors, construction and services. The former added 152 companies in the last 12 months, going from 6,516 companies in December 2023 to 6,668 at the end of 2024. Meanwhile, the services sector added 682 companies to Social Security’s books, closing at nearly 46,000.

Within the services industries, the hospitality sector, for example, has added 182 new companies in the last year, reaching almost 9,000, while the transport and storage sector has grown by 181 new names to 3,263. In addition, companies dedicated to real estate activities were 97 more in December 2024 than a year earlier and now exceed 2,300.

Within services, however, companies dedicated to wholesale and retail trade, which number the most within the tertiary sector in the province, are falling back somewhat. Their numbers fell by seven companies in the last year, although there are still 11,690 registered with Social Security.

More companies, but less growth

There are more companies in Malaga than in any other Andalusian province, but in some sectors the pendulum swings even higher to Malaga’s benefit. If one in five Andalusian companies is in general from Malaga, in the case of the construction sector it is close to 30%, while in the services sector its proportion exceeds 26%, meaning one in four. The same is true in the hospitality sector and in the real estate business Malaga accounts for almost 40% of all such companies in Andalucía. Within the services industries Malaga only lags behind in wholesale and retail trade, where the 11,700 companies in Malaga pale in comparison with the more than 13,500 in Seville.

Services and construction clearly underpin business growth in Malaga and are strong enough to compensate for the decline in the productive fabric suffered by agriculture and industry. The primary sector reduced the number of companies registered with Social Security by 57 to 3,075. Meanwhile, in industry some 14 companies disappeared.

It was precisely the performance within the agricultural sector that was key to the fact that the leading provinces in Andalucía for company creation last year were Jaén and Cordoba. The former has added 2,730 company registrations with Social Security, making a total of over 31,600. These were all from the agricultural sector, which alone added 2,823 trading companies, bringing the total to 17,105 companies, which means that half of the productive fabric of Jaen belongs to the primary sector. Moreover, with its 2,732 new companies registered last year, this province accounts for half of all the corporate growth recorded in Andalucía in the whole of the financial year 2024 (5,218). However, Jaén has seen a reduction in all other sectors, both in industry and in construction and services.

After Jaén, the second province with the greatest growth in the number of companies was Cordoba with 806 more names registered with Social Security, 707 of them in the agricultural sector. However, in this case it has managed to maintain the number of industrial companies and has seen an increase in the number of service sector companies.

In Seville, the number of companies increased by 505. It is the fourth province after Jaén, Cordoba and Malaga in terms of growth. Seville has also managed to add names to the books across all sectors except in industry where it has lost 67 companies in the last 12 months.

In Andalucía as a whole the number of companies in the last year grew by 5,218 to almost 269,000. Most of these are companies in the agricultural sector (3,863, the bulk of which, as we have seen, being based in Jaén and Cordoba). Companies in the primary sector make up a total of more than 56,400 across the region. However, the industrial fabric has shrunk by more than 200 companies in Andalucía to just over 16,000. Meanwhile, the number of construction companies is 138 more than a year ago with Malaga adding 152 of those, but in other provinces it has decreased, giving a total of 22,661 for the whole region. Lastly, the growth in the list of companies in the services sector across Andalucía was 1,419 companies, of which practically half (682) are from Malaga.

This post was originally published on here