Colombia has 29,312 companies that file financial statements with the Superintendency of Companies. Together they billed 1,399 trillion pesos in 2025 and grew 7.4% in nominal terms. With inflation closing at 5.10%, that comes to barely 2.3% real growth.
But the average hides the interesting part. One in five closed the year at a loss: 6,639 companies with negative net income. And they are not the ones you would expect.
A note on scale: Colombian financial reporting uses the long scale, where billón means a million millions. Throughout this article “trillion” means 10¹², which is what a Colombian reader sees as billón.
Large companies lose money more often than SMEs
This is the finding that turns the size-equals-solidity assumption on its head.
| SMEs (IFRS for SMEs) | Large (full IFRS) | |
|---|---|---|
| Companies | 24,911 | 4,401 |
| Revenue | $520 tn | $879 tn |
| Growth | +8.8% | +6.6% |
| At a loss | 21.7% | 28.1% |
Companies reporting under full IFRS account for 62.8% of total billings, yet they grow more slowly and lose money more often than the SMEs. Anyone building a portfolio by looking only at large companies is not looking at the healthier segment.
Mining: the sector that is bleeding out
Mining and quarrying is the only major sector contracting: −13.8% in revenue. And 43.3% of its 469 companies closed the period at a loss, nearly double the national average.
Filtered to full-IFRS filers only, that figure climbs to 50.7%: more than half of the large mining companies closed in the red.
The names confirm it. Among the ten largest revenue declines in the country, seven are mining or oil: Drummond stopped billing $3.64 trillion, Trafigura $1.75 trillion, Cerrejón $1.38 trillion.
Billing a lot is not the same as earning
Jerónimo Martins — the operator behind the Ara chain — is the second-largest company in the country by revenue at $16.34 trillion, and shows up sixth in the ranking of largest losses: $579 billion in the red.
In the other direction, Cenit bills a third of what Claro bills and earns five times as much: $5.12 trillion in profit at a 76.4% margin. Claro, first in billings, drops to seventh by earnings.
The accounting loss warns you before the auditor does
Of the 29,312 companies, 6,639 closed at a loss but only 444 carry a statutory auditor’s opinion other than unqualified. The financial signal runs far ahead of the opinion: anyone waiting for the auditor to speak up arrives late.
How it was built
The source is the filing cover sheet and the statement of comprehensive income by function of expense, fiscal year 2025, cross-referenced against the CIIU Rev. 4 A.C. classification (Colombia’s adaptation of ISIC Rev. 4). Three criteria worth knowing if you plan to replicate it:
- One row per tax ID, preferring the individual filing over the separate one and the most recent cut-off date.
- The current and prior periods are paired within the same filing — tax ID, entry point and cut-off date. Taking them separately crosses different filings and the variation comes out as zero.
- In separate filings, profit includes the equity method applied to subsidiaries while ordinary revenue does not. That is why net margins in financial and real-estate services run off the scale: they measure a holding company, not an operation.
All information is public and pertains to legal entities.
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