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Key promotional area: Start-ups and general corporate finance – business sector Mittelstandsbank (SME Bank)
Start-ups very important for national economy
With their courage to become self-employed and launch new products and services, start-ups drive development, stimulate competition and create jobs. KfW offers start-ups and young businesses a range of different financing programmes as well as comprehensive advice as a means of promoting start-up activity in Germany.
KfW recognises successful start-ups
Current trend
The sustained strength of the labour market significantly curbed Germany’s start-up activity in 2016, with the number of start-up entrepreneurs down year-on-year by 91,000, or 13%, to 672,000 persons.
Succession programme
Corporate succession a challenge for SMEs
Demographic change is raising concerns that corporate succession will suffer notable losses in the near future. On the one hand, more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seek successors every year. The succession exchange platform nexxtChange helps them in this endeavour. On the other hand, Germany's historically healthy labour market situation is causing start-up activity and thus successor potential to decline considerably. Delays or failure in business transfers puts investment, competitiveness and jobs under pressure.
High demand for successors in SMEs
Around 620,000 companies and thus some 17% of SMEs employing over 4 million people plan to hand over or sell their business to a successor by 2018.
Corporate succession – current financing offers for businesses and entrepreneurs
| Internal or external succession: family members/employees/external individuals as start-up entrepreneurs | External succession: established business | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loan programme | ERP Loan – StartGeld | ERP Capital for Start-Ups | ERP Start-Up Start-Up Loan Universal | KfW Entrepreneur Loan |
| Applicant | Private individuals Small enterprises up to 5 years | Private individuals for projects in SMEs up to 3 years | Private individuals Companies up 5 years | Companies from 5 years |
| Maximum loan amount | EUR 100 thou. per applicant | EUR 500 thou. per applicant | EUR 25 m per project | EUR 25 m per project |
| Share of financing | Up to 100% | 30% (western states) 40% (eastern states) subordinated loans | Up to 100% | Up to 100% |
| Exemption from liability | 80% obligatory | 100% obligatory | 50% possible* | 50% possible |
| Commitment volume 2016 | EUR 270 m | EUR 117 m | EUR 3,245 m | EUR 5,811 m |
* For investments of companies older than three years
KfW Entrepreneur Loan – flexible programme for SMEs
The KfW Entrepreneur Loan is a good solution for a wide variety of established SMEs’ financing requirements. KfW committed a volume of more than EUR 5.8 billion in 2016.
The first financing partners Deutsche Bank and Postbank have been using the BDO platform to make digital promotional loan commitments since 1 September 2016.
The platform provides advisors at these banks with a complete online process to finance SME customers, from application for the KfW Entrepreneur Loan, through an automatic check of promotional capacity, to an immediate and binding promotion commitment. This reduces customers' waiting time for a promotion commitment from what was previously several banking days to a few seconds.
- We promote Germany
- Key promotional area: Environment
- Key promotional area: Innovation
- Key promotional area: Housing
- Key promotional area: Individual financing
- Key promotional area: Education
- Key promotional area: Infrastructure
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Legal notice:
The information contained in this online Annual Report 2016 is based on KfW’s Financial Report 2016, which you can download here. Should this online Annual Report 2016, despite the great care taken in preparation of its content, contain any contradictions or errors compared to the Financial Report, the KfW Financial Report 2016 takes priority.
