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A quarter century of companies in Ecuador

Every year, tens of thousands of companies file their financial statements with the Superintendencia de Compañías, Valores y Seguros (SCVS). This page joins the 26 annual dumps the institution has published, from the first fiscal year in dollars (2000, the year of dollarization) through 2025, and translates them into one common language: four different charts of accounts coexisted across that quarter century. The result is the site's longest series: who files a balance sheet, how much they declare, how many people they employ.

Balance sheets in 2000
30,438
Balance sheets in 2025
152,651
Declared revenue 2025
$179,469 M
Declared employment 2025
1,648,603

From 30,438 balance sheets to 152,651

2000-2025, current dollars of each year

Companies filing a balance sheet 2000 → 2025 · ×5.0
30,438 152,651
2000 2025
See the full series
2000
30,438
2001
31,209
2002
34,363
2003
38,774
2004
41,468
2005
43,742
2006
46,363
2007
50,825
2008
55,381
2009
57,288
2010
60,525
2011
62,745
2012
64,347
2013
69,158
2014
73,178
2015
76,735
2016
79,539
2017
82,743
2018
87,055
2019
92,346
2020
98,897
2021
109,530
2022
123,731
2023
137,623
2024
147,613
2025
152,651
Declared revenue, by year 2000 → 2025 · ×9.1
$19,821 M $179,469 M
2000 2025
See the full series
2000
$19,821 M
2001
$25,407 M
2002
$29,668 M
2003
$33,547 M
2004
$38,473 M
2005
$45,445 M
2006
$51,749 M
2007
$58,358 M
2008
$71,379 M
2009
$68,553 M
2010
$80,184 M
2011
$92,782 M
2012
$101,576 M
2013
$111,051 M
2014
$118,420 M
2015
$112,933 M
2016
$105,145 M
2017
$113,060 M
2018
$120,851 M
2019
$120,787 M
2020
$105,607 M
2021
$132,081 M
2022
$149,991 M
2023
$159,050 M
2024
$163,961 M
2025
$179,469 M

In 2000, with the country freshly dollarized, 30,438 companies filed a balance sheet declaring $19,821 M in revenue. In 2025 it was 152,651 companies (5.0 times more) with $179,469 M, 9 times the revenue of back then. These are current dollars of each year, not adjusted for inflation, and even so the change of scale of the formal fabric is the story: Ecuador's corporate registry multiplied.

What bent the series

Three blows, measured in the balance sheets

The curves above do not dip on their own. Every slump has a documented date and cause, and the balance sheets record the impact with a precision the chronicles cannot: how many companies closed in the red, how much evaporated and which sectors it came out of.

The hangover of 1999

2000-2007

The series opens with the country still paying for the 1999 banking crisis. The Ley para la Transformación Económica (Law 4, Registro Oficial supplement 34, March 13, 2000) liquidated the sucre and fixed the exchange at 25,000 sucres per dollar. For a company indebted in dollars, that devaluation was a loss taken in one blow that the accounting of the era allowed spreading over several years.

That is why the start of the series looks flat: not because companies were not selling, but because the bottom line went to paying the sucre’s bill before reaching the bottom.

In 2000, 2,178 companies carried $710.7 M under "amortization of exchange-rate loss", a box the form of the era listed separately. In 2001 that charge reached $1,424 M: more than the profit of the whole country, which closed that year at a loss. The box leaves the form in 2008, and by then the national result had already multiplied.

The blow, year by year

Companies, net result and share in the red for each year of the episode
Year Net result Margin In the red
2000 · the bottom $-184.5 M -0.9% 32%
2005 $1,316 M 2.9% 23%

Oil, the safeguards and the earthquake

2014-2016

Three chained blows. Crude oil, which sustained exports and public spending, collapsed from mid-2014, and with a dollarized economy there was no devaluing to cushion it.

The adjustment came through customs: in March 2015 the foreign trade committee imposed a balance-of-payments safeguard (Resolution 011-2015, in force from March 11) with surcharges between 5% and 45% for fifteen months. And on April 16, 2016 the Manabí and Esmeraldas earthquake forced the Ley Orgánica de Solidaridad (Registro Oficial supplement 759, May 20, 2016), which raised VAT from 12% to 14% for a year.

The blow, year by year

Companies, net result and share in the red for each year of the episode
Year Net result Margin In the red
2014 $6,108 M 5.2% 17%
2016 · the bottom $3,335 M 3.2% 21%
2017 $6,201 M 5.5% 18%

The country’s profit fell 45% between 2014 and 2016, and by 2017 it was already above the previous level.

Where the loss came from · 2014 to 2016

Profit each sector lost between the two years. The bars share one scale across the three episodes.

The pandemic

2020

The 2020 close is the sharpest of the series: the country’s profit was cut in half in a single year and thousands of companies went into the red at once.

The recovery was also the fastest. A year later the aggregate result had not just rebounded: it exceeded the pre-pandemic level, with the same share of companies in the red as in 2019.

The blow, year by year

Companies, net result and share in the red for each year of the episode
Year Net result Margin In the red
2019 $4,867 M 4.0% 19%
2020 · the bottom $2,574 M 2.4% 23%
2021 $6,988 M 5.3% 18%

The country’s profit fell 47% between 2019 and 2020, and by 2021 it was already above the previous level.

Where the loss came from · 2019 to 2020

Profit each sector lost between the two years. The bars share one scale across the three episodes.

Nearly all are micro; the jobs live in the large ones

Official SCVS size segment, 2025

Of every 100 companies

Of every 100 people employed

Companies and declared employment by official size segment: micro, small, medium and large
Segment Companies % Employment %
Microenterprise 105,502 69.1% 346,044 21%
Small 32,920 21.6% 229,077 13.9%
Medium 9,957 6.5% 247,339 15%
Large 4,284 2.8% 826,140 50.1%

The two ribbons count the same population two ways and invert completely: microenterprises are 69.1% of the companies but employ 21% of the people, while the large ones are barely 2.8% of the companies and concentrate 50.1% of the declared employment. Ecuador's corporate fabric is an enormous base of tiny companies with a handful of large employers resting on top.

Segment assigned by the SCVS itself in its business ranking (microenterprise, small, medium and large). Employment is what each company declares in that same source.

The largest employers

Employment declared in 2025, and the same company's in 2015

"Before": the employment the same company declared in 2015. Comparing a company with itself is solid; comparing the country's total employment across years is not, because the ranking's coverage changes with each harvest, which is why there is no total employment curve here.

Where people work

Declared employment by sector, 2025

Declared corporate employment concentrates where the country produces and sells: wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles leads the list with 399,900 people, followed by agriculture, forestry and fishing (243,487). Each sector links to its page, with the companies that make it up.

The ones that were always there

Present in all 26 years of the series

7,786 companies filed a balance sheet EVERY single year, from 2000 to 2025: a quarter century without missing the appointment, crossing dollarization, the 2009 crisis, the 2016 earthquake and the pandemic. They are 5.1% of the companies filing today. On the right, the highest-revenue ones in 2025.

How this series was built

Source: the annual financial-statement dumps published by the Superintendencia de Compañías, Valores y Seguros (26 files, 2000-2025) and its official business ranking (employment and segment). Across that quarter century four charts of accounts coexisted: the NEC forms of the first decade, form 101 of the agreement with the tax authority, and the IFRS chart in force. Each file was classified by its own account catalog and translated into one common language of totals.

The translation is verified three ways: the accounting identity (assets equal liabilities plus equity holds in 100% of the balance sheets in 22 of the 26 years; in 2015 it drops to 93.6% due to mismatches already present in the dump), the match against the SCVS's own official ranking (99.8% to 100% of assets identical to the cent, every year, and 100% of the comparable revenue in the 2010-2013 transition) and the match against the financial statements this site already published for 2022 through 2025.

Two rescues deserve the record. The dumps of the IFRS transition (2010-2013) store the income statement under the adoption chart's codes, different from the final ones, and were read with them. And the 2014 form lacks the total-revenue box: the total was rebuilt by adding its block of revenue boxes (informational ones excluded), with a rule tested against the real totals of the sibling forms from 2015 to 2019, exact to the dollar in over 99% of cases.

What remains missing is declared: employment is not published as a total series because its coverage changes with each ranking harvest (and impossible values of the employees box, above 30,000, are discarded). Amounts are current dollars of each year, with no inflation adjustment. And this is not a census: here stands whoever filed a balance sheet, which is one part, the formal and living one, of the corporate universe.

Corporate information from official public records of Ecuador · where this data comes from