In 2024, there were 34 million enterprises in the EU, of which 3.5 million were created that year. At the same period, 3.1 million enterprise deaths were registered. This resulted in an enterprise birth rate of 10.4% and a death rate of 9.2%.
This information comes from data on business demography published by Eurostat today. The article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article on business demography.
Source dataset: bd_size
In 19 of the 27 EU countries, more companies were created than dissolved in 2024. On the contrary, in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the number of enterprises dissolved surpassed the number of companies created.
The highest enterprise birth rates were recorded in Lithuania (17.5%), Portugal (16.1%), Malta (14.4%) and France (14.2%). By contrast, the lowest rates were registered in Austria (6.3%), Denmark (7.2%) and Germany (7.8%).
On the other hand, the highest preliminary death rates of enterprises were registered in Estonia (29.2%), Ireland (16.9%) and Lithuania (15.6%). The lowest rates were registered in Greece (3.9%), Malta (4.4%) and Austria (5.3%).
In 2024, there were 180 200 enterprises that had at least 10 employees at the beginning of a 3-year period preceding 2024 and recorded an average annual growth in the number of employees above 10%. These high-growth enterprises made up 10.0% of EU enterprises with at least 10 employees and provided work for 14.1 million people.