Germany | Business: bankruptcies continue to rise strongly

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.

As many bankruptcies as since 2015 no longer

For the year 2024, for which the final data is now available, the district courts 21,812 requested company bankruptcies. That was 22.4 percent more than a year earlier when an increase rate of 22.1 percent had already been registered. A higher number of bankruptcies last existed in 2015 with 23,101 cases.

The creditor’s claims and 58.1 billion euros more than doubled after 26.6 billion euros in the previous year. The high increase is due to much more large insolvencies with claims above 25 million euros. Their number rose by 127.5 percent to 314 cases.

In relation to 10,000 companies, there were 63.5 company insolvencies last year, most of them in traffic and storage, construction and other economic services such as temporary agency work. The number of consumer bankruptcies rose, unlike that of corporate insolvencies, only slightly 6.5 percent to 71,207.

Insolving wave could continue to swell in 2025

Experts expect further increase in company bankruptcies in Germany in the current year. The information service provider CRIF expects up to 26,000 corporate insolvencies. The list of problems is long, says CRIF-Germany managing director Frank Schlein: high energy costs, challenges in the supply chains, political uncertainty. The increasing large insolvencies can also be expected to “domino effects” for affiliated companies.

According to an earlier assessment by the Creditreform Economic Occupation, the number of company bankruptcies in the current year could even reach the maximum of the crisis year 2009 with more than 32,000 cases. The Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle (IWH), on the other hand, sees early indicators that the increase in company bankruptcies could stagnate or even easily decrease.