Despite the pandemic, the Catalan capital continues to be seen as an attractive destination to undertake and grow startups. This is confirmed by the second edition of the Barcelona Global Scale-up Monitor, carried out by Barcelona Global in collaboration with CaixaBank and with the methodological support of IESE. In fact, the impact of the coronavirus crisis has unevenly affected the city's emerging companies, with 59% staying the same or increasing revenues and 41% seeing them reduced.
About 60 scale-up founders have participated in this Barcelona Global survey, based on a questionnaire with 78 questions, answered between December of last year and March 2021. The term scale-ups refers to those emerging companies that have already acquired a certain size and have expanded rapidly. Cooltra, Colvin, Fractus, Glovo, Holaluz, Iomed, Minoryx Therapeutics, Sequra or Typeform would be examples of this type of company based in Barcelona.
The profile of a Barcelona scale-up drawn in this survey shows a clear predominance of technology-based companies (96%), applied to multiple sectors, and strong internationalization. The participation of women in their founding is not very encouraging, reaching only 15% of companies that have one in their original team.
Regarding the grade they give to the city, the Barcelona entrepreneurs consulted continue to consider it a good location to start a business, and they do so even more than three years ago, going from the 4.6/7 obtained in 2018 to 5.3/7 in 2021. Its quality of life is the main cause of this result, but also influencing, although to a lesser extent, are the available workers with the salaries they offer and the possibility of attracting international professionals.
There is broad consensus that current regulation is one of the main threats to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, with 71% of respondents pointing to it as the primary obstacle. Far behind are housing, air connectivity, and the quality of digital infrastructure.
Although talent availability is seen by some companies as a virtue of the Barcelona ecosystem, others see it as one of its main problems. This feeling is consistent with what has been expressed by multiple reports, which point to the lack of suitable profiles for these new businesses as one of the pending issues for the Catalan capital.
In this regard, 61% of the entrepreneurs surveyed indicate that there is not enough labor supply and 12% believe that there is, but not with the required qualification. This issue also affects the low availability of experienced executives to grow companies, detected by 70% of respondents.
Despite the lack of profiles, 95% of scale-ups plan to hire more professionals in the next 18 months. Of these, 32% expect to incorporate more than 30 workers. This trend coincides with what some companies have registered during the pandemic, with 29% of those surveyed expanding their workforce to respond to the growth they were experiencing.