Update to how we count Peppol participants on peppol-id.eu

We have corrected how participants are counted in our statistics. During a data-quality review we found that a number of technical identifiers had been counted as if they were participating businesses. We have removed them. Below we explain what they were and how this affects the figures shown on the site.

What we removed

Alongside real business participants, the Peppol Directory contains technical identifiers used for message routing - for example dedicated "reply-to" addresses that some providers register for individual document types. These are not companies; they are routing entries attached to a provider's infrastructure. Our import had been counting each of them as a separate participant.

In total we removed about 728,000 such entries, together with a small number of test and duplicate identifiers. Almost all of them were registered under the French scheme (0225).

Impact on the figures

The total number of active participants decreased from roughly 8.14 million to about 7.42 million. The count for France was reduced accordingly, from about 4.49 million to about 3.76 million.

The effect on the Access Point Market Share was concentrated on a small number of providers whose totals had been inflated by these routing identifiers; their share is now shown at its real level. Figures for all other providers were essentially unchanged, though their relative share rises slightly now that the inflated totals are gone.

Milestone updates

A few milestone posts based on the inflated figures have been withdrawn. Those milestones will be reported again once the network genuinely reaches them.

Why this matters

The value of these statistics depends on their accuracy. We would rather correct a figure and explain it than leave a misleading number in place. We have adjusted our import so these identifiers are no longer counted, and we will keep monitoring the data for similar artefacts.