Last year 32,551 new companies were founded in Austria. That is an increase of 1.2 percent.
Christiane Holzinger, Federal Chairwoman of the Young Economy in the WKÖ.
In 2020 there were 32,551 start-ups in Austria. Compared to the previous year, this means an increase of 1.2 percent. Christiane Holzinger, head of the Junge Wirtschaft, announced these figures during a discussion about business start-ups.
These numbers are surprising insofar as the onset of the Corona crisis initially seemed to put a damper on the founding spirit: Between March and mid-June, the number of new companies founded without a carer fell by 23 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. In the entire first half of 2020, the number fell by 8.6 percent to 15,645.
According to Holzinger, it is striking that the proportion of women is increasing. The proportion of digital companies among those newly founded in the year of the Corona crisis is also high.
This trend was already foreseeable in the first half of the year. As Elisabeth Zehetner-Piewald, head of the WKÖ-Gründerservice, explained in July, this is due to the fact that the founders of 2020 had already adapted their business model to the framework conditions of the crisis: “The crisis was certainly a digitization turbo.”
