Trade carried out by EU SMEs with the US

17 November 2014
E-009372-14
Question for written answer
to the Commission
Rule 130
Alfred Sant (S&D)

Subject: Trade carried out by EU SMEs with the US

Question(s)
1. Could the Commission present the latest available data regarding the trade carried out by EU SMEs with the US, if possible up to the year 2013?

2. Could it also indicate — both at Union level and also on a country‐by‐country basis — the percentage of SMEs which conduct the majority or a significant proportion of their business with companies in the US?

3. What proportion of the total turnover (in EUR) of these SMEs is the result of business carried out with US companies?

Answer(s)

10 March 2015
E-009372/2014

Answer given by Ms Thyssen on behalf of the Commission
1. Eurostat collected additional information on international trade in goods by enterprise characteristics, with partner USA for reference periods 2011 and 2012. This additional information was provided by Member States on a voluntary basis. Consequently, data are available for all countries except Croatia and Slovenia. Table 1 contains trade data of SMEs with partner USA for 2011 and 2012 in terms of number of enterprises and trade value, separately for imports and exports. Table 4 presents the number of SMEs exporting to the US and the value of their exports by MS, together with the proportion relative to all exporters to the US. Data for Luxembourg have been excluded for reasons of statistical confidentiality.

2. The official statistics shown in Tables 1 and 4 present the number of enterprises with employees up to 249 persons trading with partner USA. The significance of this trade for the individual enterprise could not be estimated because the data transmitted by the Member States to Eurostat are at aggregated level. In order to allow a comparison with the total trade of SMEs outside the EU, Table 2 contains trade data of SMEs with extra-EU partners (EU-27) for 2011 and 2012 while Table 3 presents the share of trade with partner USA on the total extra-EU trade (EU-27).

3. Such information is not collected from Member States and therefore not available in the official statistics published by Eurostat.