Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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92. To ask the Taoiseach the total number of Irish SMEs that export, broken down between goods and services, by country, in tabular form. [16233/17]

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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The exact data requested by the Deputy is not available but some estimates can be made from the CSO’s Structural Business Statistics (SBS) surveys. The annual Census of Industrial Production, which is a component of SBS, is based on survey returns from a sample of about 2,000 industrial enterprises, combined with estimates for other enterprises based on Revenue data. Similarly, the Annual Services Inquiry is based on survey returns from a sample of about 8,000 service enterprises and combines this with Revenue data to give the overall estimates.

The sample returns from each of these two surveys give an indication of whether the enterprise is involved in exporting goods or services. The export estimates relate only to industrial enterprises employing 3 or more persons and to services enterprises employing 20 or more persons. The following two tables show the number of SMEs in Ireland above those size thresholds in 2014 and the estimated percentage engaged in exporting and the respective figures for Irish-owned SMEs.

Table 1: Numbers of SMEs in Industry and Services, 2014

Table 2: Estimated percentage of SMEs in Industry and Services engaged in exporting (based on respondent sample returns), 2014

Some information on the destination of exports is collected in the Census of Industrial Production, but not in the Annual Services Inquiry. This information indicates that an estimated 49% of exports by industrial SMEs as measured by the Census of Industrial Production (comprises predominantly goods data with some Industrial services data) are to the UK, 29% to the Eurozone, 7% to the rest of the EU, 7% to the USA and 8% to the rest of the world.