The trend remains flat. Catalonia continued to lose more business headquarters than it attracted in the first quarter of this year. Between January and March, the net balance of arrivals and departures stood at 84, with 175 companies choosing Catalonia as their base and 259 leaving, according to data from the Registry of Companies.
Although the Community of Madrid registered the highest level of outflows in the first quarter, these were offset by the arrival of new headquarters, totaling 575, yielding a positive balance of 151. In terms of departures, Madrid and Catalonia were followed by Andalusia with 193 and the Valencian Community with 114. On the negative side, Catalonia trailed Andalusia and the Basque Country, with a deficit of 31 in each case, in terms of net moves.
And why did the firms that left Catalonia choose Madrid as the location for their new headquarters? Essentially, Madrid accounted for 132 of the 259 departures. Closely following were the Valencian Community with 29, Andalusia with 27, and the Balearic Islands with 21, according to Registry data.
Catalonia and Madrid
The negative balance for Catalonia in this statistic is not surprising. In 2023, the region kept losing more corporate offices than it gained. This contrasted with the Community of Madrid, which closed last year with a new positive balance of 44, even though it is the region that experiences the most company relocations, while also absorbing the most new headquarters.
In all four quarters of 2023, Catalonia recorded a total of 856 departures and 696 arrivals, while Madrid saw the inverse: 1,623 departures and 1,667 arrivals. Since October 2017, Catalonia has registered more than 5,700 headquarters openings, yet the overall balance is a loss of around 2,700. In Madrid, the region gained about 1,800 as more than 7,000 offices left while nearly 9,000 offices landed there during the same period.
With this trend of more exits than arrivals, several solutions have been proposed: from achieving political stability to the controversial idea by Junts to create incentives to lure companies back and even penalize those that do not return.