Astoundingly resilient Last year, in 2021, creative industries – and the overall economy in general – suffered greatly from the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many sectors have also proven to be extremely resilient. Overall, this has even set the creative industries on the upswing.
The creative sector is an extremely heterogeneous field, and the challenges Styrian companies faced in 2021 due to COVID-19 are just as diverse. While the entire event sector was struggling to a significant extent, some other sectors were almost able to boom and increase their value due to their expert knowledge in an entire range of digital skills. All in all, creative industries are proving to be astonishingly resilient. With a range of innovative products and services, they are able to react quickly and flexibly to new circumstances.
There are no current figures for the development of the creative sector after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic for 2021, as Creative Industries Styria only commissions an evaluation of figures by KMU Forschung Austria every 2 years. The most recent figures dating back to October 2020 accordingly relate to the period between 2016 and 2018. They attest to an enormously dynamic and exceedingly positive development in the creative sector: 4,800 creative companies (2016: 4,400) are active in Styria, which corresponds to a share of 9% of all Styrian companies. The more than 17,500 self-employed and employed creative professionals (2016: 16,100) generated a turnover of 2 billion Euros (2016: 1.7 billion). The gross value added at factor costs amounts to almost 1 billion Euros (2016: 0.8 billion Euros).
creative companies active in Styria
4
(2016: 4,400)
4,800
These figures show that the Styrian creative economy has improved dynamically in the period from 2016 to 2018. The number of companies and workers has increased by around 9% each. Sales increased by more than 16% between 2016 and 2018, and gross value added by almost 18%. These high increases are largely due to the software and gaming sector, which accounts for 35% of sales and more than 40% of the added value by creative companies in Styria. The largest sectors are software and gaming, advertising, performing arts, architecture, and books and publishing. Comparatively generated turnover
2 Mrd
small economic sectors include radio and TV as well as the music industry. Most of the companies based in Styria deal with advertising (22%), followed by software and games development (20%). The sectors performing arts and
Astoundingly resilient
