Three thousand two hundred and eighty firms. That is how many foreign affiliates operated in Macedonia in 2024 - domestic enterprises under the control of foreign entities. That is 4.7 percent of all business entities in the country. Those same 4.7 percent produce 37 percent of the entire gross value added and employ a quarter of all workers in the business sector.

The numbers come from the State Statistical Office and are not new in their logic, but they always look different when you line them up side by side. A hundred and five thousand people work in those foreign affiliates. Total revenue comes to 802.8 billion denars, and gross value added to 183.8 billion denars - around three billion euros.

Where the value is created

The largest contribution comes from manufacturing, with 35.3 percent of the value created in foreign-controlled firms. Information and communications follow with 16.7 percent, and wholesale and retail trade including motor vehicle repair with 11.5 percent.

The distribution of the number of firms and the value they create do not track each other, and that is the most interesting part of the statistics. Manufacturing has only 381 enterprises, but 51,214 employees and 64.9 billion denars of value added. Trade has 926 affiliates - more than twice as many - but only 12,664 workers and 21 billion denars of value added.

Information and communications: 417 enterprises, 11,466 employees, 53.1 billion in revenue and 30.8 billion in value added. With three and a half times fewer people than manufacturing, the sector creates half of its value. Energy supply is the extreme case - 127 enterprises with 2,384 employees turn over 116.3 billion denars in revenue and create 11.5 billion in value added.

Whose money it is

European entities control 92.8 percent of the foreign affiliates. EU member states control 44.6 percent of them, but those firms employ 62.8 percent of everyone working in foreign affiliates and generate 61.9 percent of their value.

Individually, Austria leads with a 17.4 percent share of the value created, then the Netherlands with 11, Germany with 9.7 and the United Kingdom with 9 percent.

What this figure says, and what it does not

Four point seven percent of enterprises creating nearly forty percent of the value is a fact that can be read two ways, and both are true. The first: foreign capital is productive, it employs qualified people and creates more per worker than the average domestic firm.

The second: everything outside those 3,280 firms - and that is over 95 percent of all business entities in the country - creates less than two thirds of the value. That is not a story about how good the foreigners are. It is a story about how small, informal and low-productivity the rest of the economy is.

And here is the question the statistics do not answer: how much of those 183.8 billion denars of value added stays in the country as wages, taxes and reinvestment, and how much leaves as dividends?