Service

Increasing employment in the service industry

The service industry is difficult to define as a large number of companies are engaged with services to varying degrees. As such, defining a company as a service company becomes a matter of estimating the extent to which its activities revolve around services.

Many sub-industries and three major 
In the following, the service industry is defined relatively narrow, and thus comprise of the following sub-industries; hotels, restaurants, rental and leasing of equipment, placement and employment agencies, travel agents, guard and security services, property services, cleaning services and landscape gardeners, repair of household equipment, hairdressers, laundries and other services and other operational services.

In these sub-industries, there were 38,793 companies in 2008, an increase of 7.5% compared to 2000.¹ The distribution of companies in the services industry is fairly constant over time and the fluctuations are relatively small.²

Current Progress since 2003
The turnover in the service industry amounted to DKK 155.6 bn. in 2008 and has experienced strong growth, which in particular has manifested itself since 2004. From 2000 to 2008, turnover increased DKK 54 bn. of which DKK 41 bn. Derived from the period since 2004.³

Limited export
Exports in the service industry is low and amounted only 5.8% of total industry turnover in the period 2000 to 2008. Simultaneously, the relative export declined steadily throughout the period from 7.6% in 2000 to only 3.8% in 2008.

The decline in relative export is caused both by increasing total turnover, and by the fact that export sales have declined. In 2000, exports amounted to DKK 7.7 bn though only DKK 5.8 billion in 2008.⁴

Significant increase in employment 
Unlike exports, the number of fulltime employees in the service industry has grown significantly. In 2000, the industry was had 110,000 full-time employees, and in 2008 mustered 141,500 employees, representing an increase of 28.6% over the period.

As with turnover, the majority of the increase occurred in the period from 2004 onwards, as the number of full-time employees grew by 22.6% or 26,000 persons. The increase is approx. The same in all sub-sectors, however, within the employment and recruitment agencies nearly twice as many full-time employees have been hired - within security services 259% more employees have been hired.⁵

¹ Statistikbanken, GF2. 
² Statistikbanken, GF2. 
³ Statistikbanken, GF2 (current prices). 
⁴ Statistikbanken, GF2. 
⁵ Statistikbanken, GF2.

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