14 February 2025
Bilbao Campus
The BBK Banking Foundation and Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness (Deusto Foundation) have joined forces to create an Observatory that aims to make visible, support and promote Basque companies that lead niche international markets. These companies are also known as Hidden Champions as they are generally unknown to the public because they are niche companies, belonging to the manufacturing sector and operating in Business-to-Business (B2B) markets.
The initiative aims to be a loudspeaker to highlight the enormous value of these companies for the economic fabric of the Basque Country and seeks to generate a community of Hidden Champion companies to identify their specific challenges and needs and open channels of dialogue to exchange experiences with the aim of promoting the development of more companies with these characteristics.
The methodology developed in recent years by Orkestra has made it possible to identify 38 Hidden Champion companies in the Basque Country, which currently employ more than 15,000 people, and another 50 that are likely to become so. Their success lies in a strong focus on excellence through competitive advantages built in a specific niche, internationalization and a clear innovative orientation.
One of the most relevant features of these companies is that they generate stable and high quality employment. In addition, they have an important weight in the Basque economy since the vast majority of Hidden Champion companies develop their activity in sectors considered key or driving forces for our economy. Thus, their supply chains are linked to the territory itself and they are at the forefront in the sectors in which they operate.
Internationalization is something natural for them because they usually do not find enough demand in the domestic market and aim at the international market, where they export 75% of their sales, reaching market shares of some of their star products equivalent to TOP1 sales in the European ranking or TOP3 in the world ranking. In this way they contribute to the positive balance of foreign trade.
They have a clear innovative vocation and open character, since they are specialists who compete for differentiation and invest 4% of their turnover in R&D&I, twice the usual average of other similar companies, and promote an environment of constant innovation and improvement that contributes to placing the Basque Country on the map of industrial and technological excellence.
They are mainly Basque-owned companies with a significant weight of family businesses (34 %) and cooperatives (24 %), deeply rooted in the territory and committed to the environment where they are located, so they tend to establish strong relationships with suppliers in the territory and their value chains are mostly local. In addition, they are characterized by working in a sustained manner with local knowledge actors, such as technology centers or vocational training centers.
Given that most of the Hidden Champion companies are distributed in small or medium-sized urban centers, they promote territorial balance by acting as mitigators against the growing concentration of population in metropolitan agglomerations, fleeing from large cities where population concentration is on the rise.
Observatory of the Hidden Champions
With the aim of making visible the value of these companies for the Basque economy, BKK and Orkestra have launched the website www.campeonasocultas.eus which places the 38 companies identified as Hidden Champions on an interactive map where you can see their names and the sector in which they operate.
It is a living platform that will continue to grow and incorporate new sections. One example is the “Case Studies” section, dedicated to those companies that have managed to maintain a successful trajectory and that can serve as an inspiration for other counterparts to reach such high positions, becoming leaders in international market niches. In addition, the methodology will continue to be refined year after year to monitor the evolution of these companies and identify potential Hidden Champions and serve as a basis for specific studies.
The launch of the Observatory and its corresponding roadmap is a milestone in the development of the project. The companies have welcomed the initiative very positively and the Hidden Champions community will meet for the first time on March 11 at the BBK Kuna space, in a working session that will seek to identify the challenges faced by these companies in order to address them collaboratively.
The Observatory is a project promoted by Orkestra, which has been analyzing in depth the features that define these companies for years, and has the support of the BBK Banking Foundation, an entity highly committed to social development and economic promotion through the promotion of business projects with deep roots in the territory.
Access to the observatory: www.campeonasocultas.eus
