The creation of companies reactivates in Barcelona

Sandra Díez was about to set up her company when the pandemic broke out. She had in mind to create Runderfy, a platform that organizes weekend trips to attend sporting events such as races, including registration and accommodation booking. These plans had to be postponed due to COVID, which canceled this type of event, and it has not been until now that Díez has been able to resume them. Runderfy was born this June and is preparing its launch for September, waiting for the sports tourism sector to fully reactivate.

While Díez saw how the pandemic made it difficult to start Runderfy, Glòria Mitjana has seen the current moment as ideal to create her company. Kukis Music wants to translate the Early Childhood and Primary educational curriculum into songs, facilitating learning and motivating an approach to music in the youngest children. For Mitjana, the current context of change allows for the adoption of new tools. The acceleration in digitalization that has occurred in education also helps. The songs that Kukis Music has devised to learn the letter B or to learn numbers from 1 to 10 will begin to be heard in ten schools in the next academic year, with the aim of extending them to more centers in the following one.

Both Díez and Mitjana are examples of companies that have been created this first semester in Barcelona. After a complicated 2020, the city's economy is beginning to recover. This is confirmed by Barcelona Activa, which has contributed to the constitution of 323 new companies during the first semester of 2021, 39% more than a year ago, when 232 were created. The 2019 figures have not yet been reached, but it is only 17% below.

The figures registered by Barcelona Activa only reflect a small part of all the companies that have emerged in the Catalan capital during the first months of the year, but they are a good thermometer of general behavior, says the director of Business Services at Barcelona Activa, Jaume Baró. In fact, the data collected in the Commercial Registry show a similar trend, with a total of 3,433 commercial companies born between January and May, 53.1% more than during 2020 and, at the same time, 7% less than before the coronavirus.

"We are returning to a normal pace in company creation," Baró values. Despite the uncertainty caused by covid not having disappeared, Baró believes that the economy is getting used to it and, consequently, new initiatives are appearing that want to respond to the business opportunities that have been generated with the crisis, as well as others that were frozen in March 2020 are recovering.

In a normal year, between 6,000 and 9,000 companies are established in Barcelona. For Baró, this figure will be around 8,000 this 2021, after 2020 closed with the lowest registration in the last seven years, with about 6,242.

More mercantile companies than self-employed

Barcelona Activa has also detected that, in company creation, the proportion of new mercantile companies compared to that of self-employed individuals is larger now than in 2019. Taking into account that the former represent a larger structure and hire more personnel, Baró sees in this figure a sign of robustness of the business fabric that is being generated in the city. For him, this is explained because the new initiatives respond to the business opportunities that are being detected and not to the need to become self-employed after a period of unemployment.

Many of these companies incorporate new technologies, this sector being one of the great beneficiaries of the pandemic, thanks to the acceleration that has occurred in the implementation of digitalization with teleworking, virtual classes or telemedicine. According to Barcelona Activa data, 36% of new companies are based on activities intense in cutting-edge technology and knowledge, a proportion that exceeds that of 2020, when it was 26%.