HOW IS THE TOP 500 COMPILED

AND WHO IS INCLUDED?

he EM Top 500 index lists private and public limited companies with their registered offices located in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. It does not include large employers who have their registered offices elsewhere; nor does it include public organisations, mutually owned, co-operatives and Educational and Health Trusts which derive most of their income from Government.

The 2023 index uses historical data from Companies House accounts filed for the period between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. It ranks companies by their annual turnover and also includes the number of employees and the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) recorded. This is accessed via the FAME database published by Bureau van Dijk. The approach builds on and integrates the ‘Top 200’ indices for each County.

This time period includes the first full year of the COVID-19 Pandemic and lockdown periods, which means that all companies will show some effects resulting from this period.

Because the index is based on company accounts, it inevitably lags current company performance by around two years, since companies have up to nine months after their year-end to file their accounts. The datasets for the county-level indices were compiled, checked, standardised and then combined into the East Midlands dataset. There are rigorous checks to eliminate duplicates, to remove companies which have become insolvent or in liquidation, and to ensure that groups of companies and subsidiaries are shown accurately. The gap between the company year-ends and publication of the index means the information is historic rather than current, but it is not ‘out of date’. The availability of the three previous years means that comparisons over a four-year timespan from 2020-23 are now possible. The index is increasingly recognised as a valuable baseline for economic recovery and the resurgence of businesses and the wider economy, and we hope to accelerate release of the Top 500 data for the next period, July 2021-June 2022.

WHO IS IN THE TOP 500?

Headline Changes From 2022

The decrease in the aggregated turnover of the Top 500 continues the declining trend which first became apparent in 2022 with the release of the 2019-2020 data, showing a 4.3% decrease, but it is much greater at 9.3%. This should not be a surprise because it shows the impact on sales performance of most companies arising from the Covid pandemic, restrictions and lockdowns during the year in question. The decrease in employment, of 7.5% is smaller and suggests that employers were retaining staff, supported by government support such as furloughs.

For comparison, the UK economy GDP fell steeply by 25 points during the period April-June 2020 and then recovered, with a second, smaller dip in Sept 2020-Jan 2021, before continuing to recover more gradually. The national figures are mirrored in the East Midlands Chamber Quarterly Economic Survey of regional firms’ business confidence for Q2 2020-Q2 2021. There is no doubt that the period of Covid greatly impacted firm performance, both in loss of sales and additional costs, but that this was followed by steep growth.

Also, given that this was an exceptional period, the recovery started to occur at different times in different sectors, depending on the resumption of ‘normal business’ face-face sales and service. We anticipate this will be apparent in the next EM Top 500, covering the 2021-22 period, whether the trend in declining sales performance slowed, or (more likely) that revenues increased.

New entrants compared with 2022: 97 firms. These are primarily due to companies with increased turnover which brought them above the threshold, together with changes in corporate structure and registered office moves into the region. This is an increase from 78 new firms in 2022, and represents a 19.4% turnover of companies which indicates an increased level of ‘churn’ within the index, by introducing new firms. Thirty-nine of these are in the 401-500 tier of the index. These include companies to watch in the future for continued growth. This also meant that 97 firms left the index. These departures reflect companies whose turnover declined or grew less than the index, or who became insolvent, dormant or went into administration; acquisitions or sales; and registered office moves out of the region. Even here, there was a happy outcome for clothing retailer Joules, which was bought out of administration by NEXT Plc and continues to trade.