Industry overview
The Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply sector across Belgium comprises approximately 829 enterprises employing about 21,315 people and generating €55.1 bn in net turnover in 2022. The average enterprise size is 27 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 11.2% of revenue in 2022, the sector reports €6.1 bn 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
Cost of revenue dominates the Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply P&L at 82.4% of turnover, reflecting the high material and input content of activities in this sector. Personnel costs account for 4.7%, with energy purchases adding 10.4%. Procurement efficiency and contract management are therefore the two strongest profit levers for operators in this segment.
Productivity & human capital
Each employee in the Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply sector generates approximately €2,483,000 of net turnover against a labour cost of €90,000, yielding a productivity-to-cost ratio of 27.6. Value added per employee stands at €408,000 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 10.8% to 11.2% (+0.4 percentage points), broadly stable performance. 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.