Business start-ups boom in Malaga with more than 50% growth in last decade

Malaga is setting record after record for company start-ups. July was the busiest month for the registration of new trading companies in the province with a total of 594, an 18% increase on the 503 registered in the same month in 2023. This is just one of the many figures published last Friday by the Andalusian institute of statistics and cartography (IECA), which uses the official bulletins of the Registro Mercantil Central (Spain's official trade register) as a basis.

Malaga is growing more than Andalucía as a whole. In the region, some 1,572 new businesses (from sole traders to full-blown companies) were set up in July, that's 15% more than in the same month last year.

Behind the regional figures there is a great deal of diversity by province. On the one hand, there are three of Andalucía's eight provinces with growth in the number of business start-ups at a higher percentage of that recorded in Malaga, although they start from a lower base. The increase in Cadiz is 62% from 97 new companies in July 2023 to 157 in the same month this year. Meanwhile, the rise in Granada is 33%, from 93 to 124 from one July to the next. Finally, Jaén is 21% up from 38 in 2023 to 46 in 2024. Turning to the downside, Almeria, Cordoba and Huelva have worse figures for this year than last, with falls close to 25%.

In any case, Malaga continues to be the most active province in Andalucía in terms of company start-ups. It is far behind Seville, with 415 new companies registered last month, which is 15.60% more than the 359 registered a year earlier. The 594 new businesses in the Costa del Sol province represent nearly 38% of the 1,572 that have been created in the whole of the autonomous region of eight provinces. This means that practically four out of every ten new companies that start up in Andalucía are based in Malaga.

So, Malaga is the province with the highest business creation rate despite not being the province where the registration of commercial companies has grown the most compared to the figures of a year ago. That honour goes to Cadiz. However, Malaga is the Andalusian province that has most improved these statistics in the last decade, the one that has seen the greatest growth in corporate dynamism in the last ten years. It is simply because, taking the 594 new companies in July this year to compare with the 390 in July 2014, the rate of new business generation has grown by more than 50% in the last decade.

No other province matches Malaga for this level of growth. Taking Andalucía as a whole, the 1,572 new companies recorded for last month, when set against the 1,305 created 10 years ago, represents an increase of only 20%. In the region, after Malaga, it is worth highlighting the speed at which the creation of companies has picked up in Cadiz, with 41% more this year than in 2014, while in Jaen and Seville the increase is around 22%. On the other hand, in Almería, Cordoba and Granada fewer companies were created in July than in the same period just a decade ago.

Malaga's growing economic strength can also be seen in another metric: ten years ago, the 390 companies that were formed in the province represented almost 30% of the Andalusian total, which stood at 1,305. In other words, three out of every ten companies that were set up in Andalucía were from Malaga, whereas nowadays it has become clear that that figure now stands at four out of every ten. Furthermore, with respect to the second in the provincial rankings, Seville, if in 2014 Malaga beat it in terms of company generation by 15%, ten years later the number of new businesses in Malaga exceeds those in Seville by more than 40%.