Status: 03/28/2023 08:29 a.m
Many medium-sized companies are increasingly suffering from succession problems. According to a recent survey, this will mean that thousands of companies will have to close in the coming years.
No successor in the company: This means that many medium-sized companies are on the brink of collapse in the near future. This is the result of a survey by the German Reconstruction Loan Corporation (KfW). The state development bank published its KfW SME monitor today.
Retirement from the market due to lack of a successor
According to this, around 560,000 of the approximately 3.8 million medium-sized companies will be looking for a successor by the end of 2026. According to the results, around 190,000 of them are planning to leave the market without a successor plan.
According to KfW, around 70,000 planned company transfers could fail by the end of this year alone due to a lack of a successor. The analysis is based on data from 10,796 companies that took part in the latest wave of the KfW SME Panel.
“We will encounter unwanted company closures more frequently. In the near future, it will probably affect every fourth successor request,” Fritzi Köhler-Geib, chief economist at the state development bank KfW, told the dpa news agency.
lack of suitable candidates
Furthermore, the most important reason for the failure of a company transfer is the lack of suitable successors. Almost 79 percent of the companies surveyed stated this. A year earlier it was 76 percent. The entrepreneurs also see hurdles for a successful company transfer in the lack of agreement on a purchase price (34 percent of those surveyed) and the great bureaucratic effort (28 percent).
The increasingly unfavorable demographics in Germany are playing an important role in exacerbating the problem. The baby boomer generation with high birth rates is followed by clearly lower birth rates, and in many cases there is simply a lack of offspring.
Transition within the family popular again
At the same time, the generation of entrepreneurs in Germany is getting older in medium-sized companies. According to KfW, company owners who are looking for a short-term successor are on average 64 years old. A third of company owners are then over 60, three times as many as 20 years ago.
In recent years, the Corona crisis has meant that successors in medium-sized companies are once again being sought more often within the family. According to the survey, 53 percent of companies with sales of up to 500 million euros favor this variant. Before Corona, the proportion was only 45 percent. The sale to external interested parties or to employees are the other usual forms of company transfer into new hands.