ASEDIE publishes its annual report on Spanish infomediary sector

ASEDIE (Multisectoral Information Association) has published its report in which components, market behavior and characteristics of infomediary sector in Spain are analysed. To carry out this study, the entity has identified and analyzed 602 infomediary companies (21 companies less than in the previous edition) -firms that re-use public/private sector information to develop products or services for the whole society- classified into nine segments: culture; directory services; economic and financial; publishing; market studies; geographic information; weather; tourism and others.

Located mostly in the Community of Madrid and Catalonia, 50% of the evaluated companies belong to the market research area, as previous years, followed by financial entities with a 14 per cent and cultural institutions with a 10 per cent. The less representative sector is the meteorological industry, which covers only 1% of the total.

Analyzing the origin of the type of information, 90% of the infomediary companies operate with private information (42% only "private" and 48% "public and private"), and 58% of them use public information (10% only "public" and 48% "public and private").

Total revenues associated with the infomediary companies in 2014 were close to 1,400 million euros compared to 1,000 million in 2013. This figure allows to assign average revenue of 2.27 million euros per company; concentrated in four groups: market research, economic and financial, geographic information and publishing. In addition, the number of employees in this sector during that year exceeded 15,000 workers, decreasing 3.2% from the previous report.

Nevertheless, a sign of the remarkable evolution of national infomediary sector is the 6.6% growth in sales in comparison to the previous year, a positive evolution if we take into account that the turnover for 2013 had dropped 2% in sales.

Moreover, the assessment methodology of this last reports has been slightly modified, adding three new types of analysis: two of them based on the evolution of the companies included in previous reports and the third divides the companies into five sections according to their commercial risk exposure and their probability of default. In this regard, 77% of the infomediary companies are included in the group of low-moderate risk, 19.6% of them are included in the high-maximum level and, finally, 3.5% of the companies are defaulting.

Thanks to the study and its evolutionary analysis of the last four years, ASEDIE report shows us that information is an important and essential resource for socio-economic growth in Spain; allowing the assessment of impact, relevance, qualities and influence of the sector at national level and the comparison  with other geographical areas.