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Malaga province saw the creaton of 692 new companies in January, down 2.67% on the same month in 2024, according to figures published on Tuesday by Spain's INE national statistics institute. Despite this fall the province remains in third place in the Spanish ranking, behind only Madrid (2,286 new companies, some 6.7% more than a year earlier) and Barcelona (1,683 more companies, representing an increase of 0.85% compared to the first month of 2024).
Malaga therefore remains ahead of its closest competitors in this category, namely Alicante (with 596 companies created in January, 6% more than in 2024) and Valencia (542 companies registered in that month, 15% less than in 2024). Just out of the top five in sixth position is Seville that, with its 391 new companies registered in January, has suffered a 7.5% drop in new business activity.
Speaking of Malaga and Seville, let's look at what has happened for all Andalucía: 1,864 companies were created in January, a year-on-year decrease of 2.35%. Still, these figures mean that the province of Seville accounts for practically one out of every four new companies created in the region while the 692 new companies in Malaga account for 37% of that 1,864 total for Andalucía.
In Spain as a whole, company start-ups also fell in January: the 10,677 new companies registered in the first month of 2025 are 0.4% less than in the same month a year earlier.
The INE statistics also show how many companies went out of business during the month of January. In this particular ranking Malaga is second only to Madrid: in the first four weeks of the year, 195 companies were liquidated in the province, an increase of 14% compared to a year earlier. In Madrid, the figure was close to 1,150. In Alicante, which is the province in third place in terms of company dissolutions, the number was 160.
Here, what happened in Malaga does contrast with what happened in Spain in general because, in the country as a whole, the number of companies dissolved fell slightly by 0.7%, to 3,907. In Andalucía, however, the number of companies disappearing rose by 7%, to 667, which means that of every ten companies going out of business in Andalucía in January, three were from Malaga.
If we take the number of companies created and compare that figure with the number of those dissolved, we can subtract the latter from the former to find out by how many companies the productive fabric has really grown in each province and beyond. In Malaga, if we subtract the 195 companies that disappeared from the 692 companies created in January, the result is a net creation of 497 companies during the first month of this year, which represents a decrease of 8% compared to the figure for the same period in 2024, when the net number of new companies was 540.
Therefore Malaga again differs from the situation in Spain as a whole since, at national level, the net growth of the productive fabric has remained practically flat with respect to a year earlier at around 6,770 companies.
Still, under this heading Malaga province is in third place in Spain in terms of business dynamism after Barcelona (1,630 net new companies in January) and Madrid (1,137 new companies) and ahead of Valencia (484 net new companies), Alicante (436) and Seville (238).
41% of the net total of companies created in Andalucía are from Malaga
There are 497 companies in Malaga compared to 1,197 across all eight province in this region.
These figures also mean that 41% of the net total of companies registered in Andalucía is based in Malaga.
In any case, company start-ups in Malaga province suffered a setback in January. This is reflected in the INE statistics. Another data report also published this week by Andalucía's IECA (the institute of statistics and cartography) suggests that the slowdown continued in February.
The IECA report measures the business mass by taking as a reference the number of companies registered with Spain's social security contributions system. In February 2025 there were 57,946 companies in the province, which represents an increase of 611 compared to the figure for the same month a year earlier. If we compare the February 2024 figure with that of 2023, the growth in the number of companies registered with social security was practically double (1,166 more, going from 56,169 to 57,335 from one year to the next).
This is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout the region: the growth between February 2023 and the same month in 2024 was 2,134 companies, a figure that contrasts with the 1,636 registered between February 2024 and the same period in 2025.
IECA's statistics also make it possible to discern the sectors where these companies have been created. Thus, if the number of companies registered with social security has grown by 611 in the last 12 months in Malaga, this is entirely explained by the contribution of the services sector, whose number of companies has increased by 742 between February 2024 and the same month in 2025. This positive figure, together with that of the construction sector (163 more companies), more than offsets the decline in the critical mass of agriculture (258 fewer companies) and industry (36 fewer companies).
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