Brazil has a record of 5.7 million companies, but more than half lack employees

Brazil had a record of 5.7 million companies in 2021, of which 3.1 million, 53.7% of the total, lacked salaried employees and were only constituted by their owners or partners, the Government reported this Wednesday.

The number of active companies in Brazil rose from 5,435,000 in 2020 to a record 5,749,599 in 2021, an increase of 5.8%, according to the Central Register of Companies (Cempre) published by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Despite the economic crisis generated by the covid pandemic, in 314,500 new businesses were opened in 2021 compared to 2002 and 509,400 in the two years since 2019.

This growth, however, was mainly driven by companies without salaried employees, which are mostly firms opened by self-employed workers to offer services.

The total number of companies constituted only by their owners or partnersrose from 2.63 million in 2019 to 2.86 million in 2020 and up to 3.08 million in 2021, which is equivalent to the opening of 448,700 new firms of this type in two years.

The number of companies with at least one employee cfell from 2.60 million in 2019 to 2.57 million in 2020 and it rose to 2.66 million in 2021, that is to say that in two years only 60,600 new ones with employees were opened.

The data indicates that many workers laid off during the pandemic opened new businesses or their own companies to offer their services as freelancers and seek other sources of income, according to economist Thiego Ferreira, responsible for the study.

The number of owners and partners of companies in Brazil, for the same reason, it rose from 7 million in 2019 to 7.7 million in 2021.

This did not prevent the number of salaried employees of active Brazilian companies grew by 4.9%, to 47.7 million in 2021. In other words, in full recovery from the pandemic, Brazil generated 2.2 million new salaried jobs in one year.

Source: EFE