The Eurostat project ‘Smart Statistics’ started in February 2018 and will be finished in March 2019. At the end of January 2019, Eurostat will organise a workshop on ‘Trusted Smart Statistics: policymaking in the age of the IoT’ . The project includes three Proof of Concepts (PoCs): ‘Smart Mobility Statistics’ (PoC1), in ‘Smart Business Cycle Statistics’ (PoC2) and ‘Smart Labour Market Statistics’ (PoC3). The focus of this paper is the PoC2, which will explore how economic indicators can be derived from satellite imagery. Business cycles are important economic phenomena. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for developed countries occurs in cycles around a positive trend. These cycles have an enormous influence on society’s welfare and well-being. Basically, business cycles are the workload of the economic production factors labour and capital. The workload of the production factor labour is highly correlated to the employment rate and with this to the income of most of the households. Fluctuations in using the factor capital have an influence on the investments or the income of the capital owners for example. All these effects are able to reinforce or to stabilize business cycles and with this to influence the growth of the GDP. Because of the influence of business cycles for income and wealth, the economic parameters that are responsible for the cycles are of core interest to politicians. Their goal is to stabilize the growth of the GDP through economic policy. For this purpose they need information about the state of the business cycle. This can be done for example by forming indicators of the business cycle and combining them into a system [1]. Furthermore, it is important that this information is of high quality and up-to-date. Traditional methods of reporting the GDP in official statistics work very well and have a high accuracy. However, the reporting process is complex and introduces a time lag of several weeks to publication. The goal of ‘Smart Statistics’ is to reduce this time lag by deriving indicators from economic activities, which are visible in satellite images. Satellite images are available with a short delay of only a few hours. The processing of the data and the detection of economic activities can also be done comparatively fast and thus allows a publication of economic indicators with a delay of only a few days. However, while these indicators are based on auxiliary data and cannot be expected to have the same accuracy as traditional methods of determining the GDP, these indicators can help to determine the state of the business cycle in almost real time.