Status: 04/11/2022 08:52 a.m
The number of business start-ups has risen significantly in the past year. This is reported by the state development bank KfW. Apparently, many founders had merely postponed their plans.
Many people in Germany implemented their self-employment plans that were put on hold during the Corona crisis last year. According to data from KfW, 607,000 people realized their business start-up ideas. That was 70,000 or 13 percent more than in the crisis year 2020.
The start-up activity has thus left the Corona kink behind and has roughly reached the pre-crisis level of 2019, reported KfW chief economist Fritzi Köhler-Geib.
Less “emergency start-ups”
In the past year, founders more often ventured into self-employment in order to take advantage of a business opportunity that arose. According to KfW, the proportion of so-called opportunity start-ups rose to 82 percent. In 2020, the proportion was still 80 percent.
The proportion of emergency start-ups fell to a low of 15 percent. Necessary founders are those who become self-employed due to a lack of better employment alternatives. In the preliminary evaluation of its start-up monitor, KfW analyzed that the heavy use of short-time work may have contributed to the fact that more people did not take up self-employment out of necessity. The remaining three percent were mixed forms of opportunity and emergency start-ups.
According to the information, the majority of the founders became self-employed with new companies (85 percent). From KfW’s point of view, however, this is not good news for SMEs, which are plagued by succession worries.
The situation in the Corona year 2020
In the Corona year 2020, the number of start-ups had fallen to a low point. Only 537,000 people dared to take the leap into self-employment. In detail, there were 201,000 full-time citizens and 336,000 part-time workers. That was eleven percent less than in 2019.
According to data from KfW, the corona crisis was also the main reason for the end of self-employment in 2020. In 2020, around four out of ten founders ended their self-employment within five years of starting their business. According to a KfW survey, the corona crisis was decisive in just over half (56 percent) of the terminations.