Brazil lost 2,865 industrial companies in 2020

In 2020, the year the pandemic began, Brazil lost 2,865 industries, according to calculations by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which announced today the Annual Industrial Survey (PIA): Company and Product (2020).

That year, the country had 303,612 companies, compared to 306,477 in 2019 – a drop of 0.9%. It was the lowest level of the historical series since 2010 when the same survey ascertained 299,862 companies.

“It was the seventh consecutive drop,” said institute researcher Synthia Silva when talking about the data. She informed that, in 2020, the institute detected a continuation of the loss of steam of the companies in the industry, in the business sector as a whole.

According to IBGE researchers, in the total number of companies in 2020, 6,300 were from the extractive sector, and 297,300 were from the transformation industry.

Commenting on the seventh consecutive year of decline in the number of companies, the specialist noted that, in this period, until 2020, Brazilian companies have had to deal continuously with a series of turbulences in the economy.

She recalled the recession of 2015 and 2016 and noted that, at a time when some companies had not yet recovered from that crisis, the pandemic in 2020 came, causing a substantial negative impact on the Brazilian economy. “It was a succession of crises,” she summarized.

In non-deflated numbers, that is, not comparable to previous years, IBGE also informed that the gross value of industrial production of this total of companies was R$3.6 trillion (US$654 billion) in 2020, with the extractive industries accounting for R$275 billion; and the transformation industry was R$3.3 trillion.

In the same year, the costs of industrial operations were R$2.1 trillion, with the transformation industries accounting for the largest part, R$2 trillion, and the remainder, R$79 billion, for the extractive industries.

The value of industrial transformation – a kind of added value for the industry, the difference between the gross value of production and the costs – was R$1.5 trillion, of which R$196 billion referred to the extractive industries; and R$1.4 trillion to the transformation industries.

The institute further informed that the Brazilian industry had a productivity per worker of R$201,500 in 2020.

Finally, the investment in fixed assets in 2020 was R$213 billion, of which R$33 billion in extractive industries and R$180 billion in transformation industries, according to IBGE.

With information from Valor Econômico