A German company files for bankruptcy every 20 minutes!

An 11-year high data, as corporate bankruptcies in Germany in 2025 hit their highest level in eleven years, after German courts announced that 24,064 corporate bankruptcy applications were registered, an increase of 10.3% compared to the previous year.

According to the Federal Bureau of Statistics, this increase has continued to rise in recent years, after the number of bankruptcies in 2023 and 2024 increased by about 22% each.

Volker Trier, chief analyst at the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), said 2025 was a clearly weak year for the German economy, explaining that on average a German company was declaring bankruptcy every 20 minutes.

Experts attribute the rise in bankruptcies to two years of economic stagnation, which has depleted the financial reserves of many companies, and last year, the German economy grew only slightly by 0.2%.

Despite the current increase, experts point out that the numbers are still lower than the levels of previous crises, with 32,687 bankruptcies during the global financial crisis in 2009.

Experts predict that bankruptcies will continue to rise in 2026, with several sectors facing significant challenges, especially the automotive industry and the healthcare sector, while stressing that a new dramatic jump in numbers is not expected at the moment.

Experts also believe that some bankruptcies may play a role in reorganizing the market during periods of economic transformation, noting that many cases are due to changes in consumer behavior or wrong management decisions within companies, citing notable examples such as the German department store chain Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof.