Foundations Report May 2023: Startups pick up steam again
4044 new companies were founded across Switzerland in May. Thus, startups increased by 8.56% compared to last month. Despite the positive growth, there were 6.30% fewer companies compared to last year.
French-speaking Switzerland gains momentum
French-speaking Switzerland continued to be the top performer among the regions and at the same time showed a remarkable increase compared to last month. A total of 1152 companies were created, 14.74% more than in April 2023. Vaud carried home the victory with a growth of 30.46% and thus 394 new companies, replacing Geneva from the top spot. Compared to the previous year, French-speaking Switzerland lost 8.50%, with the canton of Geneva performing 12.83% worse.
Sunny prospects in German-speaking Switzerland
After the decline in start-ups in April, almost all regions of German-speaking Switzerland showed strong growth. Central Switzerland shone with an increase of 19.23 percentage points compared to the previous month. The largest share of the 589 startups was achieved by the Canton of Zug, where the number was 258 and consequently 41.78% higher than last month. Compared to May 2022, there was not much change, with a decrease of 2%.
Northwestern Switzerland also showed a strong performance with 887 startups, with this number representing an increase of 10.88% compared to last month. May 2022 fared 5.34% better in this regard, with 937 new firms. Eastern Switzerland saw similarly high growth, achieving 498 startups, an increase of 10.67 percentage points. 215 of these new companies were accounted for by St. Gallen, resulting in 14.36% more startups than in April.
Zurich unable to follow the trend
Zurich was the only region in German-speaking Switzerland in May that was unable to keep up with the rapid pace. A total of 748 companies were founded and thus the number of start-ups fell by 7.43% in direct comparison to April. A decrease of 5.79% was also recorded compared to last year.
In Ticino, measured against last year, there was also a slump, as the number of startups was 170, which was 21.66% lower than in May 2022. Compared to April, the performance remained constant, as there was a slight increase of 0.59%.
Outlook
This year’s May brought us a lot of sunshine and at the same time a large number of new foundations. The 4,000 mark was cracked with great force and almost all regions performed significantly better than in the previous month. However, the previous year’s figures could not be surpassed and so we hope that the start-ups will gain even more strength next month.
