Industry overview
The Mining and quarrying sector across Belgium comprises approximately 172 enterprises employing about 2,224 people and generating €949 M in net turnover in 2022. The average enterprise size is 14 employees per firm. This is a useful yardstick when assessing whether your own operation sits within the typical scale band of the sector.
Profitability
With a healthy operating margin of 14.3% of revenue in 2022, the sector reports €136 M of gross operating surplus (Eurostat's EBITDA-equivalent, before depreciation). This figure provides the headline benchmark against which an individual operator can sanity-check their own bottom line, values significantly below indicate cost or pricing pressure, those above suggest competitive advantage worth defending.
Cost structure
The Mining and quarrying cost mix is reasonably balanced: cost of revenue at 69.1%, personnel at 16.1% and energy at 5.9% of turnover. Without a single dominant cost driver, margin management requires attention across the full operating envelope rather than focus on any one line.
Productivity & human capital
Each employee in the Mining and quarrying sector generates approximately €405,000 of net turnover against a labour cost of €48,000, yielding a productivity-to-cost ratio of 8.4. Value added per employee stands at €130,000 This is a headline figure to compare against individual firm performance when judging whether headcount is creating proportional value.
Trend & trajectory
Over the period 2010 to 2022 the operating margin moved from 15.0% to 14.3% (-0.7 percentage points), a deteriorating trajectory that warrants attention. Sectors with stable or improving margins tend to reflect successful pass-through of input costs and disciplined capacity management; declining margins typically point to either over-supply or a structural cost squeeze that warrants strategic review.