Small and medium sized enterprises, or 'mkb' (midden- en kleinbedrijven) in Dutch, include enterprises which employ fewer than 250 employees, with micro enterprises employing zero to nine employees, small enterprises employing 10 to 49 employees and medium enterprises employing 50 to 249 employees. Despite often not being included in the name, micro enterprises are also included in this category. SMEs play a very significant role in the Dutch economy as these micro enterprises amount to almost
, compared to almost 49,100 small and 10,000 medium sized enterprises. On the other hand, there were only
, meaning there were over one thousand times as many micro enterprises as large enterprises. When looking at the trends of SMEs, a tendency of growth can be seen in the Netherlands, especially of micro enterprises as they have more than doubled in the past 15 years. The
sector had the most SMEs at over 401,000.
Employment and value added of SMEs
In terms of employment, even though micro enterprises are by definition the smallest type of enterprise, they
employ the most workers, which can partly be explained by the number of micro enterprises far exceeding any other type of enterprise. This equates to micro-enterprises making up the
highest share of employment in the Netherlands at around 27.6 percent. A similar picture is painted in terms of the
value added by SMEs, as micro-sized enterprises account for a significant portion of this, although medium-sized enterprises had a slightly larger share of the value added to the Dutch economy. While the share of value added of SMEs has remained relatively stable, the
value added of SMEs has grown in recent times, with each size of business contributing to this growth. br>
Dutch SMEs in the Benelux
Much like in Belgium and Luxembourg,
SMEs in the Netherlands make up the vast majority of all enterprises in their respective countries; most so in the Netherlands and Belgium at 99.9 percent and least in Luxembourg at 99.5 percent. The Netherlands has the
highest number of SMEs,
highest value added by SMEs and
highest employment of SMEs, which is to be expected given the relative sizes of the countries. Perhaps surprisingly, the Netherlands does not have the
highest share of employment in SMEs of the Benelux countries with 63.8 percent, compared to 66.3 percent in Belgium. On top of that, the Netherlands also had a significantly lower
share of value added by SMEs compared to Luxembourg, with SMEs accounting for 61.4 percent of value added in the Netherlands compared to 64.1 percent in Luxembourg.
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