Business failures in France increased by 35% over one year in the second quarter, boosting the number of jobs at risk, according to a study published Tuesday by the specialized firm Altares. A total of 13,266 liquidation, reorganization and safeguard proceedings were opened before the commercial courts from April 1 to June 30.
This level now clearly exceeds that of before the health crisis: during the same period of 2019, there were 12,347 failures and 12,925 in 2017. The number of jobs threatened by these failures jumped by 82.3% to 55,700 in the second quarter of 2023, well above the ten-year average of 42,609 jobs at risk per quarter. Altares specifies in a press release that the threshold of 55,000 jobs threatened “had not been approached since the second quarter of 2014”.
“If the building is still below the pre-Covid thresholds, other activities are conversely very hard impacted, in particular those in direct contact with consumers (clothing, care, hairdressing, etc.)”, details office. “More than nine procedures out of ten concern VSEs (very small companies with less than 10 employees), three quarters of which are immediately liquidated”, observes the director of studies of Altares Thierry Millon, quoted by the press release.
He adds that more than 1,100 SMEs and ETIs have also defaulted, up 55% over one year. Young companies that are less than three years old, on the other hand, resist better with 1,657 companies in default, “far below the 2,000 procedures opened during the second quarter of 2019”, before the Covid-19 crisis. In general, business failures had fallen sharply during the health crisis due to the business aid put in place by the government.
They subsequently experienced a catch-up movement which has not yet been completed, according to the latest statistics from the Banque de France, but the latter takes into account micro-enterprises (auto-entrepreneurs) that Altares excludes from the scope of his investigation. A positive sign, the upward trend in failures could stop during the second half of the year, while the month of June “gives us a more encouraging signal, despite the default of major players”, believes Thierry Millon. “After 28,500 failures in mid-year, the second half could then have around 26,000 failures,” he ventures to predict.
