The European Commission is creating a new category of “small mid-cap” companies that will be exempted from eight EU laws, it announced Wednesday.

Companies with up to 750 employees, and either €150 million in turnover or up to €129 million in total assets, will be considered “small mid-caps” and be exempted from rules including the General Data Protection Regulation, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and the Batteries Regulation.

Companies with fewer than 250 staff are already exempt from reporting obligations under these laws. The extension of this threshold to 750 employees is designed to help growing companies avoid the “brutality” of suddenly needing to comply with European regulations, internal market and industry chief Stéphane Séjourné said in a briefing to journalists. 

Ahead of the launch of the Commission’s latest simplification proposal — called the fourth omnibus on small mid-caps — Séjourné said the new category encompasses a little over 38,000 companies in Europe that aren’t often present in capitals but are regional economic players and could grow into larger European companies.

Through this change, “we create the conditions of the new industrial fabric of tomorrow,” Séjourné said.

The ongoing review of legislation under earlier omnibus simplification proposals will also include this new definition, allowing for affected companies to be exempted from reporting obligations under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence directive.

Séjourné touted the proposal as the EU’s “most important economic strategy,” as it targets the administrative burden of a broad range of companies, and didn’t rule out other regulatory exemptions for small mid-caps. “We’ve chosen a few texts to illustrate what this definition could be used for, and it’s by no means exhaustive of all the things we can do next,” he said.

The eight laws in question that will be changed through targeted amendments are: General Data Protection Regulation; Regulation on Protection against Dumped Imports; Regulation on Protection against Subsidised Imports; Markets in Financial Instruments Directive;  Prospectus Regulation; Batteries Regulation; Critical Entities Resilience Directive; and the Fluorinated Greenhouse Gas Regulation.

Séjourné clarified an exemption would be added to the bloc’s GDPR legislation for the change to take effect. The law won’t be reopened unless that happens as part of a broader simplification push led by his colleague Michael McGrath, he added. The comments follow major pushback on the idea of reopening data privacy laws that took years to negotiate.