Entrepreneurs face the crisis.

Business insolvencies in France rebounded strongly in 2022 and accelerated in the fourth quarter, according to a study published Monday by the specialist firm Altares, which expects them to exceed their pre-crisis level in 2023. sanitary.

"With 42,500 procedures opened in 2022, the number of failures shows an exceptional increase of nearly 50% compared to 2021, a rate never observed before", according to Altares, which lists all the procedures registered with the commercial courts.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, 12,256 procedures were opened.

The different calculation of the Banque de France

The Banque de France, for its part, reported in early January a number of business failures slightly higher than 41,000 in 2022, but which, unlike that of Altares, does not take into account companies subject to a safeguard procedure, which numbered 1,125 last year.

Altares notes, however, that the level of insolvencies reached last year is still 10,000 lower than in 2019. During the health crisis, many companies were indeed protected, some even artificially kept alive thanks to the aid granted by the the state.

“While the return to pre-Covid standards has been underway for a year, the increase in failures is accelerating alarmingly for SMEs with between 10 and 100 employees, of which more than 3,200 have defaulted in 2022, with a third in the fourth quarter alone,” according to the firm.

The number of jobs threatened by these failures, which had fallen below the 100,000 threshold in 2021, jumped to 143,500.

Just over 51,000 failures in 2019

"While at Altares, we thought we would return to the level of defects of 2019 at the start of 2024, this level of 2019 will probably be exceeded in 2023", estimates Thierry Millon, director of studies at Altares.

Just over 51,000 failures were recorded by Altares in 2019, that year having been the year in which they had been the fewest since the financial crisis of 2008.

Since 2020, companies in difficulty have been saved more rarely: direct judicial liquidations thus represent three-quarters of the procedures, compared to two-thirds before Covid-19, and this despite calls from the government and the Banque de France for the managers anticipate their difficulties and thus allow a sale of their company or a spreading of debts.

Lastly, Thierry Millon observes that although safeguards, reserved for companies which are not yet in a state of suspension of payments, are more numerous than ever, they still only represent less than 3% of the whole, 17 years after the entry into force of this procedure.

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