Anyone arriving at a Luxembourg company profile from a foreign register has the same reaction: something is missing. No turnover, no breakdown of charges, often no profit and loss account at all. That is neither a collection failure nor secrecy. It is what the Luxembourg form asks for, and it is worth understanding why.
Two statements, and the right to publish one
Luxembourg annual accounts consist of a balance sheet and a profit and loss account. Several provisions of the amended law of 19 December 2002 restrict the publicity of the second: on filing, a company may tick a box marking its profit and loss account, or its balance sheet and profit and loss account together, as confidential.
The right is widely used. Across every period filed since 2012, 51.7% publish a balance sheet with no profit and loss account. A confidential statement is absent from the data — not present as zero — and must never be reconstructed.
The abridged model, which does not ask for turnover
A second cause, independent of the first. A company that stays under the statutory thresholds may file an abridged profit and loss account, and that model starts at gross profit or loss: it has no turnover line, no breakdown of raw materials, no split of external charges.
Put the two together and turnover is available for only 7.6% of filed periods. That is why the rankings on this site lead with total assets and capital and reserves. A Luxembourg ranking by turnover would describe a minority of companies while appearing to describe all of them.
What stays public, and it is a lot
Confidentiality covers how the result was arrived at, not the result itself. The balance sheet stays public, with total assets, fixed assets, current assets, capital and reserves, provisions and creditors.
And the result for the year is in there too, under capital and reserves. That is the peculiarity which makes the figure far more available than you would expect: it stays public for 99.5% of periods. Total assets appear in every single one.
A note on currency
Luxembourg law lets a company keep its accounts in the currency of its business, and 11.2% of the register files in something other than the euro — over ten thousand in dollars, close to six thousand in sterling. A balance sheet total read without its currency is not an approximate figure; it is a different amount.
What to take from it
A Luxembourg profile reads differently from a German or Slovak one. The balance sheet carries most of the information, the trading account often none, and close to one company in three holds more financial assets than everything else on its balance sheet combined — for those, the balance sheet is the business.
Whether a company publishes its profit and loss account is itself public information about it, and this site says so for every period.