Portfolio data visualization
Ethiopia Business Landscape
An interactive explorer of formal business registrations by region, sector, business type, and registered capital.
Showing all 345,369 registered businesses.
Where Businesses Are Registered
Every region in the registry, ranked by how many businesses are registered there.
Bar length is a straight count. The drop after the first two bars is the shape of the whole register; the note on the chart says how steep it is. By the bottom of the list a region is down to a few hundred businesses.
Sector Mix
How registrations divide across the eight recorded sectors.
Each slice is a share of the businesses currently in view. Trade and Service together account for roughly three quarters of everything registered.
Top Business Types
The most common kinds of business, one level below sector.
This is the tier most people mean by “what the business does”. Change the region or sector above to see how the ranking shifts.
Capital Concentration
Where reported capital sits, rather than where businesses sit.
How to read: each tile is one sector and business type; colour is the sector, and the label gives the exact figure. Tile area uses a compressed scale so small categories stay visible — compare the printed values, not the rectangles. Note how different this is from the count charts: Logistics is a modest share of businesses but the largest single pool of capital.
Legal structure
A Nation Run by Individuals, Not Institutions
Strip away the taxonomy and the geography, and the first thing the registry shows is who is actually doing business. Not corporations. Not cooperatives. People — filing under their own name, running an enterprise with no legal separation between themselves and the business.
Legal Structure of Formally-Registered Businesses
Excludes sole proprietorships — this shows only the shape of the formal remainder.
Partnerships are the largest formal category by far — nearly double every other formal structure combined. Share companies, the vehicle of choice for large capital-raising ventures, account for barely half a percent of all businesses in the country.
Who Owns These Businesses
What legal form these businesses take — individuals, or institutions.
Each bar is the share of a sector owned by one person. The pale track behind it is everything else — partnerships, companies, cooperatives. The slope down the list is the point: the less capital a sector needs, the more of it is one person with a trade licence. Hover a bar, or tab to it, for the full breakdown of legal forms.
Who Owns a Business, and What They Put In
The ways a business can be registered, and the money each one starts with.
Two bars for every kind of owner. The left bar is
how many businesses are registered that way. The right bar is the
money a typical one of them registers — typical meaning half
register more than this and half register less. Each column is
drawn to its own scale, so read down a column rather than across
the two.
The two columns lean opposite ways, and that is the point. The
forms almost everyone uses — a single owner, or a partnership
— are also among those putting in the least money, while the
forms that carry real capital are the ones almost nobody uses.
What is left out. The chart draws the six commonest ways to register, which between them are 99.9% of the country’s register. The rest — 204 state enterprises, trade associations and charities — are held back because a typical state enterprise registers 6 million birr, and a bar that long would squash every other one flat. The table below has every form. A further 27 businesses have no legal form recorded at all and appear in neither.
Businesses Against Capital
Half the country’s businesses hold a sixth of its money. One sector in seven holds more than half.
What it shows. Every sector gets two numbers: its share of the 345,369 registered businesses, and its share of the 2.13 trillion birr those businesses declared when they registered. The chart lays one over the other so you can see where the two disagree.
How to read it. Each of the eight spokes is one sector, named at its tip. How far a point sits from the centre is how big that share is — the centre is zero, and each ring is labelled with the share it stands for, out to 58.2% at the rim. There are two outlines: blue for the share of businesses, orange for the share of capital. Where the two lie on top of each other, a sector holds about as much of the money as it does of the businesses. Where one pulls away from the other, it does not, and that gap is the whole point of the chart.
Why it matters. Counting businesses and counting money give two different pictures of the same economy, and almost everything written about a business register uses the first. Trade is half of every business on the register and a sixth of its capital. Logistics and transport is one business in seven and 58% of the capital. So a programme aimed at where most businesses are and a programme aimed at where most of the capital is would land on different sectors, in different parts of the country, and reach different people — from the same register, read two ways.
What registered capital is. The figure a business
declared at the moment it registered. It is not revenue, not current
assets, and it is never revised afterwards, so read it as a statement
of intent at the door rather than a measure of what a sector is worth
today.
Read the shape, not the area. On a radar the area of a
shape grows with the square of its values, so a sector at 58% looks far
more than three times one at 16%. The axis order is arbitrary too:
rotating the spokes changes the picture without changing the data. The
figures below are the exact shares, and they are what to quote.
Inside the Regions
Geography below the regional headline: 134 zones and 1,161 woredas.
Click any bar to go deeper, and use the trail on the right to come back up. Regional totals hide enormous variation — Oromia alone contains 47 zones.
What Businesses Actually Do
The complete classification, down to the most specific category recorded.
Click any bar to go deeper: sector, then business type, then specialty. Construction, for instance, resolves into building, road, water and electrical contractors — detail the sector-level chart cannot show.
Regional comparison
Compare Two Regions
A side-by-side view of any two regions, using shares rather than counts.
Regions differ hugely in size, so raw counts would only ever show that Oromia is bigger. Percentages make structure comparable: whether a region leans toward trade, transport or services.
This section has its own selectors and is deliberately independent of the page filter.
Sector Share
Stacked bars compare each sector as a share of the selected region's registrations.
Business Type Share Comparison
Paired bars show the actual share of each region's businesses in the selected category.
Synthesis
One Registry, Two Economies
Put the three lenses together and the same shape appears from every angle. Ethiopia's registered economy in 2016 was overwhelmingly informal, overwhelmingly retail, and overwhelmingly concentrated in two regions — a vast field of small, individually-owned enterprises. Layered on top of that field sits a much smaller set of large, capital-intensive, often state-linked entities, visible mainly in the capital data, almost invisible in the count data.
Neither picture is the whole truth on its own. The count data says this is a nation of kiosks and minibuses; the capital data says a handful of corporations hold most of the money. Both are true at once — and the gap between them is, arguably, the single most useful thing this registry has to say about how the Ethiopian economy actually works.
What This Helps People Decide
Policy makers can identify regions or sectors where business support, infrastructure, or licensing services may be needed.
Investors and banks can compare market concentration and discover clusters of demand by sector and region.
Entrepreneurs and the public can understand where competition is dense and which business categories shape the formal economy.