This addition to the ‘Insee Références’ collection, Les entreprises en France (Companies in France) provides a comprehensive view of our productive system, taking a more structural than situational approach. Using data from companies, it clarifies the aggregated diagnosis by looking at individual behaviour. It thus takes the diversity of companies that make up our productive fabric into consideration. A significant proportion of the statistics shared in this publication come from the Ésane annual company statistics compilation programme. This draws on an array of administrative sources, most notably social and fiscal declarations and statistical surveys. This ambitious programme renders all the information consistent to provide the most detailed image possible of the corporate world. Given the time required to compile the information and the complexity of appraising individual data, the reference year for the statistics presented in this edition is 2016.