Only a small portion of the companies were dissolved due to bankruptcy. The vast majority of dissolved companies stopped voluntarily. In 2024, nearly 2 thousand companies were fully declared bankrupt and dissolved, 28 percent more than in 2023. A company can also be partially declared bankrupt if not all legal components go bankrupt. In 2024, 1.3 thousand companies were partially declared bankrupt and thus not dissolved. The share of fully declared bankrupt companies in company dissolutions fell from 3.4 percent in 2015 to well below 1 percent in 2022. Since then, the share has risen slightly to 1.3 percent.

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6 percent of the company population ceased

Since 2015, the total number of companies has increased by more than half. To compare dissolutions over time, it is essential to account for this development. This can be done by looking at the dissolution rate, which expresses the number of dissolutions relative to the total number of companies. The 153 thousand dissolutions in 2024 correspond to a dissolution rate of 6 percent. Although in 2022 more than 9 thousand fewer companies ceased their activities than in 2024, the dissolution rate was 0.1 percentage points higher then.

Nine out of ten dissolved companies had only 1 employee in 2024. In 2015, this was true for 83 percent of dissolutions, and in 2008 for 75 percent. This development is linked to the increasing share of sole proprietorships in the total company population.