The Latin term activĭtas derived into activity, a concept that in our language can be used to name an action or a function carried out by a subject or an institution. Entrepreneurial, on the other hand, is an adjective that refers to what is linked to a company (an organization that carries out commercial or industrial tasks for profit).
Therefore, it is known as business activity, the actions that a company develops to obtain profits. Business activities are very diverse and depend on the characteristics of each organization.
In its broadest sense, business activities are all those activities carried out by a company with the aim of producing and marketing the goods or services that allow it to generate income. In this sense, the tasks it performs internally to manage its capital and to organize material and human resources are also part of business activities.
Take the case of a company that markets canned fish. Among its business activities, the capture of fish, cold storage, processing, packaging and finally its distribution can be mentioned. All these processes are essential for canned foods to reach consumers through markets, shops, etc. If we focus on the economic activity of this company, we could say that it carries out a secondary economic activity (it not only obtains the raw material, but also processes it). Due to the type of activities it carries out, on the other hand, the company belongs to the fishing industry.
Since there is no rigid DEFINITION OF this concept, to further explore its scope, we will focus on an article of the Mexican Income Tax Law, where business activity is defined as the set of actions that generate income, and It includes agricultural, industrial, forestry (forestry is the cultivation of mountains or forests) and livestock, in addition to the aforementioned fishing.
In this same article six examples are listed, where we can understand more in detail what we should understand by business activity:
* The trade, in accordance with the provisions of federal laws that give the specific nature and distinguish it from the activities mentioned below;
* any industrial type activity that focuses on the conservation, transformation or extraction of raw materials, the elaboration and finishing of articles for their subsequent commercialization;
* sowing, cultivation and harvesting, as well as the first disposal of all the products obtained in said processes, provided they are not subjected to any type of industrial alteration;
* all livestock activities, that is, the breeding of animals that humans exploit to obtain food and clothing, for example, such as cows, sheep, goats and poultry. As in the case of agriculture, for livestock farming to be considered a business activity, it must include the entire process up to before the point at which the industrial transformations begin;
* fishing, which also includes the control of the reproduction of those species necessary for trade, through various measures;
* silvicultural activity. At this point we must also include the breeding, restoration and conservation of mountains and forests, as well as any movement that encourages such actions.
As can be seen, a common feature of several of the activities that we can consider business-type is that they do not include any type of industrial transformation, but rather focus on obtaining the raw material, or else on the different steps necessary to avoid that the environment in which it is extracted deteriorates, and that it continues to proliferate.
