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 aggregate balance sheet in the banking sector (—) — the top client of an ESN in Luxembourg. A financial centre with a deep IT budget.
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.
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.
A day rate is only the start.
The real question is your status (Sàrl-S vs salary portage), the true charges and the margin you can hold in a negotiation. To talk it through concretely, no strings attached: