Before writing the first slide of a business plan, six questions decide everything: is there a market, can I make money, at what cost will I staff, why now, against whom, and at what price should I sell my day? This dashboard answers each one with STATEC's structural business statistics, salaries by occupation and ICT surveys — and ends with a daily-rate calculator whose default values come from real data.
The core of an ESN is NACE code J62 — programming, consulting and IT services. Its stock has more than doubled: — → — firms in 18 years (—%). Across the whole Information & communication sector (J), we are talking about — bn€ in revenue and — jobs: the market exists, it is measurable, and it keeps growing without interruption — even in 2020.
Number of active firms in division J62. Revenue, value added and employment for sector J come from structural business statistics (SBS), 2023 vintage.
Out of 100 € billed by a typical ESN, — € remain as value added after purchases and subcontracting; on top of that, —% goes to salaries, leaving a gross operating margin of —% of value added. As management benchmarks: — k€ of revenue per head and a loaded cost of — k€ per employee. The model is viable — but capital-light: almost all of the value is paid-for brainpower.
Value added and margin (GOS) are published SBS aggregates: value added does not exactly equal revenue − purchases (inventory changes, adjustments), hence a slight play in the cascade.
| NACE division | Revenue/head | VA/head | Salaries / VA | Margin |
|---|
k€. year = latest non-confidential vintage (STATEC masks low-headcount cells). M70: revenue inflated by head-office/holding flows — read its VA/head. J62 is the best proxy for an ESN, J6202 (pure IT consulting) the premium positioning. Margin = GOS / value added.
A mid-level IT consultant costs — € gross/yr (professional, sector J); the scale runs from — € at the 1st decile (junior) to — € at the 9th (expert), a ratio of —. Two takeaways: IT salaries have jumped —% since 2010, and "pure" consulting (sector M) pays its seniors even higher (— € at the 9th decile) — the salary bidding war is the real cost of entry.
Average gross annual full-time-equivalent salary, by major occupation group (ISCO-08). For the same role (professional), you pay . Structure of Earnings Survey — excludes firms with fewer than 10 employees (so micro-ESNs and freelancers).
The "why now" fits in one figure: —% of Luxembourg firms still use no artificial intelligence at all — three in four. Cloud is only at —% adoption (—; ×3 in 9 years, but far from saturation), and GenAI at —%. For an Advisory selling transformation, the addressable market is not the early adopters: it is the overwhelming majority that has not started.
Highlighted: the IT sector itself (J), the most advanced — your future partners and competitors. The pale bars: your client markets, still largely untapped.
Jump in AI adoption in the IT sector over three years (— → —). The wave is still forming, not yet over.
of IT firms already buy cloud — versus —% in the wider economy. The gap is the migration market and managed services.
of aggregated balance sheet of credit institutions at end — (series produced by the BCL, disseminated by STATEC). The weight of the financial centre in demand for IT services is not measured in these data.
The risk is not demand, it is the supply of hands. —% of IT firms report hard-to-fill specialist posts (—), and the economy's in-house ICT employment is structurally declining (—% → —%) — outsourcing demand rises, but the talent pool tightens. Cyclical signal: IT-sector employment has plateaued since its peak of —.
of IT posts hard to fill in —. The pressure has eased from its peak of —% (—) but remains the top brake on an ESN's growth.
change in IT employment since the — peak: the tech hiring market has cooled in 2024-2025. Good for recruiting, caution on demand.
The competitive structure is a dumbbell. On one side —% of firms are micro-structures of 0–1 person… which account for only —% of employment. On the other, — firms of 50 people and more (—%) concentrate —% of jobs. The middle is empty: that is where — the SME of 10 to 50 consultants — the positioning of an ambitious new ESN plays out.
Each employment size band (persons employed), for sector J. The gap between the two bars reveals concentration: a few large players employ most of the workforce.
The average daily rate exists in no public dataset — it is built. Here is the bridge: start from a real salary (STATEC), add charges, divide by the days actually billable, apply a coefficient covering overhead, bench time and margin. Each default is tagged data or assumption.
= loaded cost per billable day: below it, every day sold destroys margin.
Cross-check: at the default salary (2022), the loaded cost comes to ~— k€ — consistent with the independent SBS figure (personnel cost per employee in sector J: —), the gap reflecting salary inflation since 2022. The realised revenue/head of an ESN (J6202) acts as a plausibility ceiling — a consultant who bills mechanically exceeds the average revenue/head, which is diluted by non-billables.