(Business in Cameroon) - An official report issued by the National Statistics Institute (INS) for 2016 revealed that three security firms are listed in the top 15 Cameroon’s largest employers. The local subsidiary of UK G4Security is ranked 2^nd just after the agricultural giant Cameroon Development Corporation.

Companies that hire a large number of employees especially for manual tasks were also listed. These include companies operating in palm groves, rubber tree production and palm oil, as well as companies in business services, excluding the agro-business giant SABC (Brasseries du Cameroun).

What contrasts is that these giants are not all listed in the top 15 companies with largest turnovers. On that latter segment, the National Refining Company is atop the list, over the period, followed by the local subsidiary of the French banking group Société Générale. Sabc which is the only one industrial company listed in this ranking closed the top 3.

The report covered 28,872 so-called modern companies, which generated a turnover of CFA11,551 billion (64.2% of GDP) at the end of 2016. Let’s note that while this figure is slightly higher than that of 2015 (CFA11,481 billion), it could however be relatively low considering that the survey in 2015 covered nearly 4000 fewer companies.

Idriss Linge