Despite the full-scale war, small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine continue to grow and even break pre-war records, OpenDataBot experts have found in a new study “Phoponomics during the Great War.”
As of September 1, there were 2,052,326 officially registered individual entrepreneurs in Ukraine, with an average of 25,000 new businesses registered every month, while in June there were 31,477 new entrepreneurs, an absolute record for the previous three years. Undoubtedly, this is due in no small part to the automatic registration of sole proprietorships in Diia, which has greatly simplified and accelerated the procedure for opening a sole proprietorship.
During the same period (from April 2022 to September 23), 290,910 sole proprietorships closed – on average, about 17 thousand are closed every month. businesses.
How and where do sole proprietorships open and close during the war?
The full-scale war expectedly changed the landscape and affected the number of businesses in the regions: from April 2022 to September 2023, the largest difference between the opening and closing of new sole proprietorships was recorded in the frontline regions and those where hostilities were or are ongoing. Yes:
- Donetsk – lost 8.2 thousand. entrepreneurs;
- Kharkiv – 7.1 thousand;
- Kherson – 4.5 thousand;
- Luhansk – 3.7 thousand;
- Zaporizhzhya – more than 2 thousand
In contrast, in the rear regions, more new businesses opened than closed over the same period. Thus, the largest increase was recorded in Kyiv – +12.9 thousand, and in Lviv region – the number of entrepreneurs increased by 12.3 thousand. Dnipropetrovs’k region rounds out the top three regions with the highest number of entrepreneurs, with 8.6 thousand new sole proprietors.
It is worth recalling the DOU study estimating the number of IT professionals registered as sole proprietors – as of February 24, 2023, there were 271,699 sole proprietors working in the IT sector in Ukraine.
