Last year 13,712 companies closed their businesses in the Czech Republic, a comparable number to 2021 but 11 percent fewer than in the record year 2020, Dun & Bradstreet said. Most of the firms closed in the property management and leasing, retail, service, food service and building construction segments. There are two new firms for every one that disappears.
Between 2012 and 2014, about 5,000 firms closed each year. Since 2015, the trend has changed and the number of closed firms has started to increase continuously. The peak came in the 2020 covid year, when more than 15,000 companies were deleted from the commercial register, said Dun & Bradstreet analyst Petra Stepanova.
There are currently two newly created companies for every one that disappears. However, if 2019 and 2020, when specific conditions prevailed on the market due to the pandemic, are excluded from the statistics, the business base has been growing at the slowest pace in the last two years, Štěpánová added.
Most companies in the property rental and management, wholesale brokerage, non-specialised wholesale, services, retail, catering and building construction sectors were removed from the commercial register last year. Most of the companies that were removed from the commercial register were 11 to 12 years old. Prague has a significant lead over other regions in the number of firms that have disappeared. Of the nearly 14,000 companies that disappeared last year, 53 per cent were based in the capital, followed by the South Moravian Region with ten per cent and the Central Bohemian Region with seven per cent.
Source: Dun & Bradstreet and CTK
