Abstract We analyze company size distribution for developing countries using the framework proposed by Ramsden and Kiss-Haypal [Physica A 277 (2000) 220]. Although this distribution does not fit developing countries data as good as it does to developed ones, the parameters of the distribution ( θ and ρ ) for developing countries are remarkably different to those for developed countries. This result supports the hypothesis that parameter θ plays a role analogous to the temperature of the economy, which could be related to the level of economic development, as reported previously by Saslow [Am. J. Phys. 67 (1999) 1239]. Also, this supports the hypothesis that ρ is related to the competitive exclusion in economics, as ρ tending to zero implies the competition free limit case where company size distribution is predicted to be a power-law, as reported by Takayasu and Okuyama [Fractals 6 (1998) 67]. Finally, we report the goodness of fit for two functions: a finite-size scaling and a log–normal. We found that these functions fit the data better in some cases. However, this is not in itself sufficient evidence that those functions are an appropriate representation of the phenomenon.