19 thousand new entrepreneurs started businesses in the South of Ukraine

In the south of the country, more than 19 thousand new entrepreneurs have opened a sole proprietorship. In total, almost 194 thousand new individual entrepreneurs were registered in the first eight months of 2024.

This is evidenced by the data of the Opendatabot monitoring service.

Since the beginning of the year, 193,192 new sole proprietorships have been registered, which is more than before the start of the full-scale war, when 186,144 new businesses were opened during the same period.

In particular, 12839 sole proprietorships were started in Odesa region, 5096 in Mykolaiv region, and 1746 in Kherson region.

After a sharp decline at the beginning of the invasion, the number of new registrations has stabilized and has been at a stable level for the second year.

The largest number of new businesses was opened in Kyiv - 26,303. New businesses are also actively registered in Dnipro (18025), Lviv (14459), Kyiv (14428), and Kharkiv (12954) regions. Zaporizhzhia region showed the largest increase in new registrations - by 11%, Kirovohrad region - by 10%, Chernihiv region - by 9.6%. At the same time, business activity declined markedly in Luhansk (-14.7%) and Ivano-Frankivsk (-8%) regions.

One third of new sole proprietorships are opened in the trade sector, while the IT sector attracted 7.6% of new entrepreneurs. The third most popular type of business is the provision of individual services (7%).

It should be noted that the ranking of areas has changed over the year: while in 2023 cafes and restaurants were among the leaders, this year they were replaced by information services. This year, the share of women among new entrepreneurs reached a record 60%, which is higher than in previous years - 55.6% in 2023 and 47% in the first year of full-scale war.

The number of new businesses is 1.6 times higher than the number of closed ones. Since the beginning of the year, 120,154 individual entrepreneurs have closed in Ukraine.

Newly established businesses suffered the most: 24.5% of those that opened last year closed, and 13.7% of those that opened this year. Most businesses closed in Kyiv - 13% (15,770), Kharkiv - 8% (10,097), and Dnipro - 8% (9,931).

In Odesa region, 9,293 sole proprietorships closed, in Mykolaiv region - 3 , 262, and in Kherson region - 2,052.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, foreigners from 101 countries have opened 3075 companies in Ukraine. Citizens are the most frequent business owners in Ukraine: Turkey - 396 companies, Uzbekistan - 312 companies, and Poland - 224 companies.

More than two thousand companies owe wages in the South of Ukraine. Overall, more than thirty thousand cases of arrears were recorded across the country. In August, more than 34 thousand cases of wage arrears were registered. Almost 2,000 companies had debts to their employees.

The leader among the southern regions in terms of the number of companies that owe their employees is Mykolaiv region, with 797 companies in total. Odesa region came in second with 667 companies. Kherson region took third place, but did not get far - 661 companies delayed salaries to their employees.