In 2024, 9,152 new enterprises were created in Cyprus, while 5,566 businesses ceased operations. The figures were published by Eurostat on Thursday, October 1. This means that the number of new businesses was significantly higher than the number of enterprises that left the market.
The enterprise birth rate in Cyprus stood at 9.7%, while the preliminary business death rate reached 5.9%. For comparison, 3,541,482 enterprises were created across the European Union in 2024. The enterprise birth rate stood at 10.36%. During the same period, a preliminary 3,143,782 enterprises in the EU ceased operations, corresponding to a business death rate of 9.2%. Cyprus therefore differed from the EU average in two key respects:
- the enterprise birth rate on the island was lower than the EU average — 9.7% compared with 10.36%;
- the business death rate was significantly lower — 5.9% compared with 9.2%.
Overall, there were around 34 million enterprises in the European Union in 2024. Approximately 3.5 million new businesses were created during the year, while around 3.1 million ceased operations.
Eurostat’s figures relate to business demography — statistics that show how the number of enterprises changes across EU countries, including how many businesses are created, how many cease operations and how the entrepreneurial sector develops.
How Cyprus compares with other EU countries
In 2024, 19 of the 27 EU countries recorded more enterprise births than business deaths. The opposite was observed in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, where the number of enterprises that ceased operations exceeded the number of new businesses. The highest enterprise birth rate was recorded in Lithuania at 17.5%. It was followed by Portugal at 16.1%, Malta at 14.4% and France at 14.2%. The lowest enterprise birth rates were recorded in Austria at 6.3%, Denmark at 7.2% and Germany at 7.8%.
The picture was different for business closures. The highest preliminary business death rate was recorded in Estonia at 29.2%. In Ireland it stood at 16.9%, while Lithuania recorded 15.6%. The lowest preliminary business death rates were recorded in Greece at 3.9%, Malta at 4.4% and Austria at 5.3%. Against this backdrop, Cyprus’s rate of 5.9% was significantly below the EU average.
However, these figures should not be interpreted directly as the number of newly registered legal entities. Eurostat uses a statistical definition of an enterprise, while business demography records enterprise births and deaths in accordance with EU statistical methodology. Recent data from the Statistical Service of Cyprus also show the significant scale of the country’s business sector. According to the latest published annual business register, Cyprus had 125,152 enterprises in 2023, up 4.5% from 119,816 in 2022.
Which companies are growing fastest in Europe
Eurostat also separately assessed high-growth enterprises. These are companies that employed at least 10 people at the beginning of the three-year period preceding 2024 and recorded average annual employment growth of more than 10%. In 2024, there were 180,200 such high-growth enterprises in the EU. They accounted for 10.0% of all EU enterprises with at least 10 employees. Together, these companies employed around 14.1 million people.
This indicator is important not only for measuring entrepreneurial activity. High-growth companies have a noticeable impact on the labor market because increases in employment reflect business expansion and the creation of new jobs. For Cyprus, the 2024 figures show a positive gap between enterprise births and deaths: 9,152 new businesses compared with 5,566 enterprises that ceased operations.
Overall, Eurostat’s statistics show that more businesses were created than closed in Cyprus in 2024. For the island’s economy, this indicates a continued inflow of new enterprises, although the pace of business creation remained slightly below the European Union average.