The first questions of the ESA 2025 constitute a common core for all surveyed units:

• The company's main activity and its secondary activities by major sector;

• A "goods ownership" section for companies with a commercial activity;

• Total turnover, date and length of the accounting year;

• The breakdown of turnover by product or detailed activity;

• Restructurings that occurred during the accounting year (merger-absorption, universal transfer of assets, partial asset contribution/spin-off, etc.);

• Intra-group sales and purchases (share of turnover and purchases within the group);

Other questions are only asked of companies in certain sectors, such as:

• The breakdown of turnover by sales type for trade companies;

• Customer analysis (distribution of turnover by customer type) in construction, trade, and services;

• The distribution of specialized construction work activities for construction companies, as well as the distribution of work carried out on existing and new buildings, and the nature of the work carried out;

Starting with the ESA 2025, the questions in the common core are combined with those in the annual production survey (EAP). The number of sector-specific questions has been significantly reduced compared to the ESA 2024.

Starting with ESA 2025, turnover breakdowns is requested according to 7-digit product codes. With some exceptions, the first 5 characters correspond to the French NAF activity classification. The last two correspond to a classification specific to our survey.

The NAF (French Classification of Activities) is a classification of productive economic activities, primarily developed to facilitate the organization of economic and social information. To facilitate international comparisons, it has the same structure as the European NACE (French Classification of Activities), itself derived from the international ISIC classification.

The published statistics are based on different levels of the French classification of activities, sometimes cross-referenced with company categories. Most often, they are at the group level, i.e., three positions or 272 groups for the entire NAF (National Association of French Companies). Some are outside the scope of our survey.

Starting with ESA 2025, turnover breakdowns will be collected according to the new classification of economic activities (NAF 2025). For more information, please see the section on NAF 2025: https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/8181066.

In terms of sectors of activity, the scope of the survey ESA in metropolitan France includes the sectors of forestry and sawmills, agri-food industries, trade, construction, transport and other mainly market services (excluding the financial sector).

In the French Overseas Territories, the scope of the ESA covers all of these sectors, plus industry.

In metropolitan France, the EAP (Annual Production Survey) survey covers industrial sectors.

legal unit for collecting data / Enterprise for dissemination

The survey covers the market economic sectors of trade, market services excluding the financial sector, agri-food industries, transportation, construction, and the forestry and sawmilling sector (classes 02.20, 16.11, and 16.12 in NAF 2025). In addition, industry covers the collection of accounting data relating to profiled companies, on the one hand, and the overseas territories, on the other.

All company sizes are included in the survey.

Calendar year / Financial year