There are three main conclusions of the first report of the Observatory of Business Margins that the Ministry of Economy has presented this morning. First of all, the vast majority of business sectors have managed to recover the level of margins they had before the pandemic. The most detailed photo is completed with an energy sector with the highest margins and a food chain that has not yet reached its pre-covid levels.
The financial sector is the one that obtains the highest margins in the first quarter of this year, with “abnormally high” levels, they say from the observatory. Its intense recovery after the covid crisis and the fall in Russian exports have caused the gross profitability on sales of the fuel production and distribution sector to go from 2% at the end of 2020 to close to 17% at the beginning of this year In the case of electricity and gas supply, the margin is even higher, since it exceeded 25% in the first months of 2023.
On the other hand, the food chain, which although at the beginning of the energy crisis was the least affected, from 2021-2022 the increase in the cost of raw materials punished its margins, so that it continues below its historical average, although with a rebound in the first quarter of this year.
For its part, a sector as affected by the pandemic as tourism managed to recover its margins at the end of 2022. It is a sector that, with the interruption of mobility due to the covid, suffered a drop in margins of close to 75%. It was not until 2021 that a now complete recovery began.
These are data that the Government considers to support its taxes on energy companies. “In the fuel generation, production and distribution sectors, as well as electricity and gas generation and distribution, we have seen a very significant increase in business margins, which confirm that both the tax and previous measures to moderate extra benefits and reduce the cost of energy were justified”, affirms the Secretary of State for the Economy, Gonzalo García Andrés.
These are the data from the first report of the Observatory of Business Margins, which can be consulted on this website, which starts with the objective, according to the Ministry of Economy, of introducing more transparency and quality information for all economic agents. An observatory that will be updated periodically, in addition to incorporating quarterly reports.
It was also born with some weaknesses, such as not incorporating the financial sector (it does not pay VAT, which is one of the main indicators used by the observatory, as well as the self-employed, who play an important role in some sectors.
