Construction is the hardest hit sector so far this year.
Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi
So far this year, significantly more companies have filed for bankruptcy in Switzerland than last year. In total, around 10,000 companies are expected to go bankrupt in 2023.
In the first nine months of 2023, the 700 bankruptcies per month mark was reached or exceeded three times, creditors’ association Creditreform said on Tuesday. These are levels that have never been reached before.
Compared to the previous year, the number of company bankruptcies (insolvencies) increased by as much as 11% to 5,466. In September alone, the increase was almost 20%, with 700 bankruptcies.
For the whole of 2023, Creditreform expects just under 10,000 bankruptcies this year, which would be slightly below the previous year’s figure (10,095). If one compares this figure with the average of 2018 and 2019, the period before the Corona crisis, it means an increase of almost a quarter.
The sector most affected by the bankruptcies is construction, with a share of 15.1%, followed by wholesale and retail (14.2%), management consultancies (11.6%) and the hospitality industry (10.5%).
In the first nine months of 2023, 38,302 new company names were entered in the commercial register, 3.3% more than a year earlier. The net balance, however, is likely to be slightly negative (-1.1%).
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
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