Bankruptcy
Before turnaround? Number of bankruptcies hardly increases anymore
Many companies lose their financial strength in permanent economic stagnation. However, the number of bankruptcies does not increase as quickly as in the past few months.
The number of company bankruptcies in Germany rose only slowly in April. For the month, the Federal Statistical Office recorded 3.3 percent more registered insolvency proceedings than in the same period last year.
This could reach the highlight of the bankruptcy wave. Experts expect a further increase in bankruptcy for the current year after a maximum of 21,812 cases had been registered since 2015 with 21,812 cases. During the financial and economic crisis in 2009, the number of corporate bankruptcies had even increased to 32,687 cases.
April 2025 is the second month in a row, in which the Federal Office only observes a single -digit growth rate compared to the previous year. Before that, there had been seven months with double -digit growth.
The procedures only flow into the statistics after the first decision of the insolvency court, as the authority emphasizes. The actual time of the bankruptcy application is often approximately three months before.
Increase by 15.9 percent in February
In February, for which the final data is available, the numbers rapidly high: According to this, the district courts reported 2,068 company insolvencies – a good 15.9 percent more than a year earlier. The claims of the creditors were around 9.0 billion euros, after around 4.1 billion euros in the previous year.
Based on 10,000 companies, there were six company insolvencies in February, most of them in the traffic and storage, temporary work and hospitality industry. The number of consumer bankruptcies, unlike those of corporate insolvencies, rose only slightly: 4.8 percent to 6,075 cases.
Does the number of insolvency 2025 have a record since the financial crisis?
The list of problems for companies is long: expensive energy, lots of bureaucracy, political uncertainty, consumption retention among consumers. In addition, exception rules have expired with which the state had tried to prevent a bankruptcy wave in corona pandemic.
If you take personal and corporations together, the number of bankruptcies in Germany has reached the highest value for 20 years, data from the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Hall (IWH) show. According to this, there were 1,626 bankruptcies of passenger and corporations in April. That is 11 percent more than in the previous month and 21 percent more than a year ago. The April numbers even exceeded the values from the financial crisis 2008/2009.
Federal Statistical Federal Office: Time series Insolvency Communication Destatis
dpa
Source: Stern
