Closed companies segmented by industry

Historical company closures by sector

We know that company closures in Spain show strong seasonality, with sharp peaks almost every January.

And there’s nothing quite like opening a good Christmas polvorón to reflect on what on earth you’re doing with your life — and decide to shut down the company.

So far, nothing we haven’t already seen in other articles in this series.

Let’s now see what happens when we break the data down a bit further and look at closures by sector of activity:

In June, just 1.9% (35) of closed companies belonged to the primary sector, 19.2% (349) to the secondary sector, and the vast majority — 78.9% (1,817) — to the tertiary sector.

June continues the downward trend seen in recent years since the 2022 peak, which marked the worst June in the entire historical series.

As a result, closures in the tertiary sector in June fell by 5% year over year and are almost 25% lower than in 2022.

The secondary sector shows a nearly 6% increase compared to 2024, but remains 34% below its 2022 level.

In the primary sector, where volumes are small, fluctuations appear more pronounced, but they largely follow the familiar June pattern of the past five years — with some years in the low twenties (2022 and 2024) and others in the thirties (2021, 2023 and 2025).

Company closures in June by industry

That said, breaking down closures by broad sectors isn’t particularly exciting… and we came here to play.

When we zoom in and analyse which specific industries recorded the most closures in June, we get our first surprise.

Despite Spain’s real estate market being at record highs — delivering returns this year that rival gold or even Nvidia — the CNAE with the highest number of closures is Real Estate Development, with 118 companies shutting down in June.

Apparently, even with property prices at all-time highs, building still doesn’t pay off in this country.

Three cheers for the Housing Law. Hip, hip, hooray.

Let’s move on.

When aggregating CNAEs by industry, the hardest-hit industry in June is Professional Services, with 290 closures. The most affected CNAEs within this industry are:

• Business and management consultancy activities: 48
• Accounting, bookkeeping, auditing and tax advisory activities: 36
• Architectural and engineering activities and related technical consultancy: 36
• Advertising: 31

In the secondary sector, the industry with the highest number of closures is Construction, with 203 shutdowns. Particularly notable are the 104 companies involved in “Construction of Buildings” and the additional 49 dedicated to “Electrical, plumbing and other construction installation activities”.

With the real estate market at record highs…

Three more cheers for the Housing Law.

In the primary sector, there’s little to highlight in terms of volume, though it is still sad to see a century-old company disappear — as we noted in last week’s article on closures by company age.

Historical closures of real estate developers

At this point, real estate developers have left me with a nagging feeling, given that this CNAE recorded the highest number of closures in June.

If we plot the historical closures for this CNAE, we get the following:

I expected to see some kind of trend, but at first glance there are hardly any distortions compared to the overall historical closure chart.

Do you see anything unusual?

Anything worth pointing out?

Let us know in the comments!