Key promotional area: Start-ups and general corporate finance – business sector Mittelstandsbank (SME Bank)

Start-ups very important for national economy

With their courage to become self-employed and launch new products and services, start-ups drive development, stimulate competition and create jobs. KfW offers start-ups and young businesses a range of different financing programmes as well as comprehensive advice as a means of promoting start-up activity in Germany.

KfW recognises successful start-ups

Current trend

The sustained strength of the labour market significantly curbed Germany’s start-up activity in 2016, with the number of start-up entrepreneurs down year-on-year by 91,000, or 13%, to 672,000 persons.

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Corporate succession a challenge for SMEs

Demographic change is raising concerns that corporate succession will suffer notable losses in the near future. On the one hand, more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seek successors every year. The succession exchange platform nexxtChange helps them in this endeavour. On the other hand, Germany's historically healthy labour market situation is causing start-up activity and thus successor potential to decline considerably. Delays or failure in business transfers puts investment, competitiveness and jobs under pressure.

High demand for successors in SMEs

Around 620,000 companies and thus some 17% of SMEs employing over 4 million people plan to hand over or sell their business to a successor by 2018.

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Corporate succession – current financing offers for businesses and entrepreneurs

KfW Entrepreneur Loan – flexible programme for SMEs

The KfW Entrepreneur Loan is a good solution for a wide variety of established SMEs’ financing requirements. KfW committed a volume of more than EUR 5.8 billion in 2016.

The first financing partners Deutsche Bank and Postbank have been using the BDO platform to make digital promotional loan commitments since 1 September 2016.

Legal notice:
The information contained in this online Annual Report 2016 is based on KfW’s Financial Report 2016, which you can download here. Should this online Annual Report 2016, despite the great care taken in preparation of its content, contain any contradictions or errors compared to the Financial Report, the KfW Financial Report 2016 takes priority.