The social contribution of large Spanish companies amounted to more than €480 billion

The revenues of the largest Spanish companies are mainly redistributed in the purchase of goods and services from suppliers (€343.731 billion), in contributions to the tax authorities (€73.520 billion) and in employees' salaries (€43.726 billion)

The social contribution of large Spanish companies to their stakeholders – employees, suppliers, public entities, etc. – and to society in general amounted to €481.522 billion in 2019. This is according to the Cash Flow Social Aggregate Report on large Spanish companies prepared by the CEOE Foundation and the PwC Foundation. Acciona also helped in preparing the document, a topic on which it has plenty of experienced after having published its own Cash Flow Report since 2014. The report was presented today at an event attended by Antonio Garamendi, CEOE Chairman; Gonzalo Sánchez, Chairman of PwC; and Santiago Barrenechea, Chairman of the PwC Foundation, among others.

The study highlights the important contribution that large domestic companies make to society. To this end, it calculates the Social Cash Flow (CFS), a metric that enables the assessment of wealth creation by different interest groups and society as a whole. The companies’ revenues are redistributed by being used to purchase goods and services from suppliers, pay employees, contribute to the public coffers and other items that directly contribute to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The use of the Social Cash Flow approach responds to the stakeholders’ demand for transparency within the current international context, where the success of companies will not only depend on and be measured by their ability to maximise their economic and financial performance in the medium and long term, but also by their ability to generate value for the different stakeholders.

To calculate the aggregate Social Cash Flow, the sample selected consisted of the top forty Spanish companies in terms of net turnover, and the information used was corporate and public information corresponding to the year 2019. For methodological reasons, this selection does not include companies in the financial sector.

Service providers and suppliers, the most benefited

The main indicators of aggregate Social Cash Flow are the inflows or direct economic value generated (customer revenues, collections from divestments and financial revenues) and outflows or direct economic value distributed (payments to suppliers, contributions to public administrations, payments to employees, dividend payments, financial payments, treasury stock and economic value retained within the organisations).

With regard to outflows, the report states that the revenues generated by large Spanish companies have mainly been redistributed to be used as follows: 71.4% for the purchase of goods and services from suppliers (€343.731 billion), 15.3% for contributions to the public coffers (€73.520 billion) and 9.1% for employee remuneration (€43.726 billion), among other items, which represents a direct contribution to the Spanish GDP.

Thus, of all the sectors of activity, the main beneficiaries are service providers and suppliers. Thus, supply chain is the main recipient of the direct economic value distributed by large Spanish companies, followed by payments to the public administrations, of which €23.868 billion (32.5%) correspond to the company’s taxes paid (borne) and €49.652 billion (67.5%) to third-party taxes (collected) as a result of the economic activity generated by companies.

As for payments to employees (€43.726 billion), the study discounts the employment-related taxes paid by large Spanish companies – €19.489 billion – since they are included in the category of payments to public administrations. The study also highlights that large Spanish companies directly employ more than 1,700,000 workers to conduct their business in the different locations in which they operate, with the economic value generated per employee amounting to €280,000. In addition, the report reflects the investment made by these companies in Corporate Social Responsibility projects, contributions to charities, NGOs, research institutes (not related to R&D), funds to support community infrastructures or the direct costs of their social programmes. It is estimated that, in 2019, large Spanish companies made contributions to non-profit organisations worth €454 million -including both monetary and in-kind contributions.

Cash Flow Social agregado de la gran empresa española – PDF