Bank of Spain and National Statistical Institute publish ViME viewer mapping multi-location companies across Spain

The National Statistical Institute and the Bank of Spain have published the Business Multilocalization Viewer (ViME), an experimental statistic and interactive tool that shows how Spanish non-financial corporations’ activity is distributed between headquarters and production establishments, with localisation down to the municipality level. Based on the results, 86% of non-financial corporations operating in Spain in 2023 (around 1.2 million) had establishments in a single location, while around 180,000 companies, mostly large firms and tens of thousands of SMEs, operated across multiple geographical areas. ViME combines the INE Central Business Register (DIRCE) with annual accounts data from the Bank of Spain’s Central Balance Sheet Data Office (sourced from the College of Property and Commercial Registrars of Spain) and reports the geographical distribution of employment, assets, sales and gross operating profit for 2022 and 2023, with interactive navigation by autonomous community, province, municipality and postal code, and breakdowns across 14 CNAE 2009 sections. The release highlights applications such as estimating the economic footprint of local shocks and interregional business links, including an example where establishments located in Paterna recorded EUR 7.7bn in sales in 2023 versus EUR 6.6bn when measured only from firms headquartered in the municipality, and data showing more than 6,000 establishments in Andalusia owned by firms headquartered in the municipality of Madrid with assets and sales close to EUR 60bn and EUR 41bn. The dataset does not cover the full population of non-financial corporations, reflecting missing annual accounts for around 320,000 companies and the exclusion of a further 60,000 that do not meet quality standards, and is intended to be enriched in successive editions.