Business in Ukraine: The number of individual entrepreneurs is growing

As of early fall of this year, Ukraine has set a historic record for the number of individual entrepreneurs (IEs) officially operating in the country. According to Opendatabot, their number is 2,052,326, and this figure continues to grow, even during a full-scale war.

Particularly striking is the fact that 31,477 new sole proprietorships were registered in June of this year, which is a record for the last three years. About 25,000 new individual entrepreneurs are registered every month.

However, despite this impressive growth, 290,910 sole proprietorships ceased operations between April 2022 and September 2023. The average monthly number of closed sole proprietorships is about 17 thousand.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has led to differences in the figures by region. Business losses are particularly high in the frontline regions and in places where hostilities are ongoing or have begun. In particular:

Donetsk region lost 8.2 thousand individual entrepreneurs.
Kharkiv region - 7.1 thousand.
Kherson region - 4.5 thousand.
Luhansk region - 3.7 thousand.
Zaporizhzhia region - more than 2 thousand individual entrepreneurs.
At the same time, in some regions, the number of new sole proprietorships exceeds the number of closed ones. This is especially noticeable in Kyiv (+12.9 thousand), Lviv region (+12.3 thousand), and Dnipropetrovs'k region (+8.6 thousand).

It is worth noting that Ukrainians have started to start their own businesses more often after the difficult periods at the beginning of the war. The largest number of "newly minted" entrepreneurs are engaged in retail trade, as well as in the field of information technology and other individual services. This demonstrates the diversity of interests and needs of Ukrainian entrepreneurs during the war.