In official statistics, the enterprise has long been associated with its purely legal definition, i.e. the “legal unit”. The provision of an economic definition offers a better vision of the country's economic fabric as links between groups are now taken into account. Similarly, within the most complex and the most diversified groups, several enterprises with a certain degree of autonomy in decision-making can now be identified. Of the three million enterprises in France, 95% are micro-enterprises employing 20% of payrollworkers. In addition, 222 large enterprises employ 25% of payrollworkers. There are also 136,000 non-microenterprise SMEs and 4,900 intermediate-sized enterprises (ISEs) employing 29% and 26% of payroll workers respectively. The economic fabric is therefore much more concentrated than the legal units approach tends to show. While legal units of fewer than 250 employees produce 41% of exports, this share drops to 16% if subsidiaries of groups in the ISE or large enterprise categories are excluded. This new vision also reallocates tertiary sector subsidiaries to their manufacturing enterprises, thus increasing the share of manufacturing in the economy. In this way the sectoral distributions of workforce, value added, exports and also means of production are modified in favour of manufacturing. In manufacturing industries, the balance-sheet totalper employee increases almost three-fold compared to its level when using the legal unit approach. The share of export turnover in the manufacturing industry is raised by four points, labour productivity grows and margin rate increases slightly.