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Q: What is the turnover of small and medium sized businesses annually? What percentage of the working population are employed by SMEs?

Mar 25 2008

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According to the The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform there were an estimated 4,551,000 business enterprises in the UK at the start of 2006. Some 99.3 per cent of these were small businesses, with 0 to 49 employees - that's around 4,513,000.

At the start of 2006, UK private sector enterprises employed an estimated 22.4 million people and had an estimated combined turnover of £2,600 billion.

Small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for more than half of the employment (58.9 per cent) and turnover (51.9 per cent) in the UK.

These seem to be the most recent figures from the BERR, and more are due to be collated in the summer 2008.

There is an interesting release from BERR on SME statistics that you can download here .

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