Gross margin of Greek wholesale trade by product category, 2024

When a Greek wholesaler sells goods for €100, those goods cost it €75.3, at the median company of 2024. The €24.7 that remain are the gross profit, before wages, rent and transport. The median company is the one in the middle: if you put them in order, half keep more and half keep less.

I took the gross profit from the 2024 financial statements of the 7,645 companies in Greece whose main activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE) is wholesale trade and that publish it. Then I put it next to the same Eurostat indicator for the whole sector.

By product category

First come perfume and cosmetics with 42.6%, then pharmaceuticals, clothing and footwear, and furniture. At the bottom is whatever sells by the kilo or the litre: grain and animal feed, meat, dairy and oils with 13.4%, fuels.

Pharmaceutical products are activity code 46.46, and very different companies sit inside it. 340 of the 694 sell medical devices, such as consumables, equipment and implants, with a median of 40.7%. The 240 with a medicines code have 20.7%, and the 120 of them with revenue above €10 million have 6.5%. This group includes the subsidiaries of drug manufacturers, which sell their own group's products, so their gross profit also contains the value of the product itself. Pharmaceutical wholesalers and pharmacists' cooperatives (ΣΥΦΑ), which supply the pharmacies, do distribution. For prescription medicines a ministerial decision sets their margin, at most 5.4% on the manufacturer's price, as the Federation of Pharmacists' Cooperatives of Greece (ΟΣΦΕ) pointed out. In the financial statements of the large ones it comes out at 3% to 10%: 4.5% for Piraeus Pharmaceutical Cooperative, 5.1% for LIA FARM, 3.8% for Cooperative Pharmaceutical Wholesaler of Epirus. The 36.5% does not describe pharmaceutical wholesalers.

In fuels the selling price includes excise duty. The duty counts in revenue but does not stay with the wholesaler, so €100 of sales leaves little. The duty does not explain the negative −2.2% that Eurostat gives for 2024, and I did not find what does. Duty also inflates revenue in tobacco products. There I have 76 financial statements, below the limit of 100 for the table, and Eurostat gives 5.1%.

You compare a company with the median and with the middle 50% of its category. In the middle 50%, one quarter of companies are below the first number and one quarter above the second. A cosmetics company with 28% is in the bottom quarter of its sector. A beverages company with 28% is in the top quarter.

Why Eurostat comes out lower

The Eurostat column is weighted by revenue: all the gross profit of the sector divided by all its revenue. So large companies count more. It compares with our weighted column, not with the median. Overall, 17.3% in the financial statements and 16.5% in Eurostat.

By category, the financial statements come out higher in 22 of the 26, by up to 8.6 points, apart from household appliances further down. A possible reason: Eurostat measures gross margin only on goods for resale, while its revenue also includes services, such as transport and installation. This lowers its percentage. I did not measure it.

The median is higher mainly because large companies keep less. In pharmaceuticals, the 169 companies with revenue above €10 million have €8.80 billion of the category's €10.01 billion and a median of 17.3%. The 525 smaller ones have 39.9%. The same shows in computers and electronics: 12.5% in the 47 large companies and 35.0% in the 295 smaller ones.

The 1,091 companies with revenue above €10 million have €57.59 billion of the sample's €71.81 billion. That is why the weighted margin of the whole sector is close to theirs. Among small companies, with revenue below €100 thousand, 13.8% have a negative gross profit. They sold for less than they bought.

In electrical household appliances Eurostat gives 6.2% in 2024 and 20.9% in 2023, with almost the same revenue, €2.43 and €2.49 billion. Our 166 financial statements give a weighted 23.3%. I did not find where the drop comes from, and the table shows 2023 next to 2024.

Gross profit is not profit. Wages, rent, transport and interest are paid out of it. In the same 2024 financial statements, the median pre-tax profit in wholesale trade was 4.80% of revenue.

Greece and the EU

In Eurostat, Greek wholesale trade kept 16.5% in 2024, 16th place among the 24 countries with data. The EU-27 average is 18.2%. The gap was 3.2 points in 2021 and 1.7 in 2024, because the EU fell: from 19.9% to 18.2%. Greece stayed between 16.1% and 16.9% in all four years.

By category, meat has 10.2% in Greece and 15.6% in the EU. Dairy, eggs and oils go the other way, 17.3% in Greece and 14.3% in the EU.

Methodology

Sources: the 2024 financial statements in GEMI, the Greek General Commercial Registry, via bizlist.gr, with revenue and gross profit as written in the income statement, retrieved on 6 October 2026. And Eurostat, sbs_ovw_act, the indicators gross margin on goods for resale (GM_GD_RS_MEUR) and net turnover (NETTUR_MEUR), updated on 30 September 2026. Margin is gross profit divided by revenue, in both sources.

Of 14,244 companies with main KAD 46 and 2024 financial statements, 9,068 report gross profit. Out go 894 wholesale agents (46.1), where revenue is mostly commissions, and 250 vehicle wholesalers. Out go also 103 with revenue below €5,000 and 176 with gross profit equal to or above revenue, where no cost of sales was found. With these in, the median goes from 24.7% to 25.3%. Also out are branches of foreign companies, consolidated group statements and anything not in euro.

The 2026 KAD coding moved sectors: the old 46.7x became 46.8x, 46.51 and 46.52 became 46.50, and wholesale of vehicles and parts went into 46.7. Companies are split between the two generations of codes, and I merged them into the Eurostat categories, which stay on the old classification.

With a revenue threshold of €1, €40,000 or €100,000 the median stays between 24.4% and 24.7%. Perfume and cosmetics and pharmaceuticals stay first, and meat, dairy and fuels stay last.

The sample has revenue of €71.81 billion, 86.8% of the €82.69 billion that Eurostat counts for wholesale trade without agents. The 5,176 companies that do not report gross profit are smaller, with a median revenue of €275,239 against €1,597,506, and sole proprietorships are also missing. In the sample small companies keep more, so the median of all wholesalers is probably a little above 24.7%.

Update 24/10/2026: I added the composition of the "Pharmaceutical products" category and the margin of pharmaceutical wholesalers, after a note from ΟΣΦΕ. The search links now return only companies with the code as their main activity, as in the analysis. Before, they also returned companies that have the code as a secondary activity. The numbers did not change.