In 2018, 11.900 enterprises in Austria operated under foreign control, according to Statistics Austria. This is 3.8% more than in the year before.
At the same time, Austrian enterprises had control over 6.000 enterprises abroad, a rise of 0.1% in numbers. Besides Germany, main target for Austrian investments abroad still was the central, eastern and south-eastern region of Europe.
Although they accounted only for 3.4% of all domestic market enterprises (not including sectors like agriculture, forestry and fishing, education, health, cultural, public and non-profit sector), foreign controlled enterprises in 2018 employed one in five persons employed (21%) and accounted for more than one third (34.5%) of the total turnover in the Austrian market economy.
74.4% of foreign controlled enterprises in Austria had their corporate headquarters within the European Union.
By far the most important partner country was Germany, accounting for 39.2% of all cases, followed by Switzerland (11.2%), Italy (5.8%), the UK (4.6%) and the Netherlands as well as the United States (4.5% each).
Though the number of Austrian affiliates abroad was more or less the same as the year before, their employment rose by 5.5% in 2018.
Turnover went up by 12.8%, mainly due to the results of multinationals’ oil and raw materials trading entities reported by their Austrian controlling units.
But also other activities in the petro-chemical cluster, like manufacture of refined petroleum products, manufacture of chemicals and chemical products, performed very well in 2018.
Foreign affiliates could mainly be found in Germany (14% of all units or 13% of foreign employment). Ranked by employment shares, Germany was followed by the Czech Republic (9.0%), Hungary (6.9%), Romania (6.5%), the United States (5.2%) and Poland (4.6%).
65.6% of all foreign affiliates were located in EU countries, reaching a share in foreign employment of 63.8%.
