An eight-year reconstruction of every August since 2017 shows Romania’s transport sector tops the sector table with almost mechanical regularity. It also shows that this August’s “dominance” is not dominance at all — it is the quietest transport August in the entire trustworthy record.

The alarming-sounding number is easy to find. In August 2026, Transport și depozitare registered 1,515 new businesses, more than any other sector in Romania, ahead of retail’s 1,171 and professional services’ 852. Read in isolation, that looks like a single sector swallowing the business register.

Read against the record, it is the weakest transport August in nine years.

The full August record

Every August from 2017 — the first year with credible full sector data — through 2026, with transport’s standing in the sector table:

Two facts jump out, and they point in opposite directions.

First, transport has never been the number-one August sector until this year. In 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 it ranked third or fourth, behind retail and construction. Its promotion to the top of the table is genuinely new.

Second — and this is the part the headline conceals — transport got to number one not by growing, but by standing still while everything around it collapsed. Transport’s August registrations fell 6.02% year-over-year, from 1,612 to 1,515. Every rival fell harder. Retail dropped 38.11%. Construction fell 33.05%. Professional, scientific and technical activities shed 22.47%. Hotels and restaurants were annihilated, down 52.26%. Real estate fell 48.95%. Manufacturing fell 46.71%.

Transport did not win the August. It survived it.

The concentration story is the wrong story

Does transport’s current share of August registrations represent a historical anomaly or a recurring pattern? Here is the answer, computed directly.

Transport’s share of all August registrations:

• 2017: 8.5%
• 2019: 8.9%
• 2020: 8.0%
• 2021: 8.9%
• 2022: 9.4%
• 2023: 10.6%
• 2024: 14.0%
• 2025: 14.1%
• 2026: 18.7%

The share has roughly doubled since the late 2010s and has climbed steeply in the last three Augusts. On that measure alone, transport concentration is real and it is worsening — a single sector now accounts for nearly one in five of the 8,103 businesses registered nationally in the country’s weakest seasonal month.

But two things complicate the panic.

The first is that August is, by a wide margin, not a month in which the economy registers many businesses at all. August ranks 10th of 12 calendar months by mean registrations, with a mean of 10,681 against March’s 13,289. It is one of the two weakest months of the year. Concentration metrics calculated on the smallest denominators of the year are inherently unstable, and comparing August shares across years is comparing noise amplified by a small base.

The second, more important complication is that the share rise is driven almost entirely by the denominator’s collapse, not the numerator’s growth. Transport’s absolute August figure has bounced between 740 and 1,658 for a decade with no clear upward trend. What has changed is everything else. In August 2022 the country registered 17,586 businesses. This August: 8,103. That is a 54% collapse in the national total in four years, against a transport sector that has fallen from 1,658 to 1,515 — a decline of just 8.6%.

Transport’s “dominance” is an artifact of arithmetic. It is the least-damaged sector in a shrinking field.

What is actually shrinking, and why

The August contraction is national and broad. Total registrations fell 29.14% year-over-year, from 11,435 to 8,103. The damage is concentrated in a specific legal form.

SRL registrations — the limited-liability company, the workhorse vehicle of Romanian entrepreneurship — collapsed 41.95%, from 7,613 to 4,419. Meanwhile PFA registrations, the far simpler sole-trader form, fell just 1.90%, from 3,415 to 3,350.

This is not a story about Romanians abandoning entrepreneurship. It is a story about Romanians abandoning formal corporate structures. The entire year-over-year decline in the month is more than accounted for by SRL losses alone: the SRL drop of 3,194 registrations slightly exceeds the total national decline of 3,332. Every other legal form combined, PFA included, was essentially flat.

What August adds is precision: the retreat is concentrated in the most capitally committed, most compliance-heavy business form, while the lightest-touch form holds steady. That is a signature of cost and regulatory burden, not of collapsing demand.

The exits do not confirm the fear

Perhaps the most surprising finding sits in the lifecycle data, and it undercuts the panic narrative directly.

August 2026 recorded 4,531 deregistrations, the largest single exit category, within 8,744 total business exits — 1,015 suspensions, 3,198 dissolutions and those 4,531 deregistrations. That exceeds the 8,103 registrations, so the month was net-negative by 641 businesses, with a churn rate of 107.91%.

But month-over-month, every exit category improved sharply. Suspensions fell 31.42%, dissolutions fell 31.00%, deregistrations fell 19.00%. The net contraction of 641 is the second-mildest month of the current nine-month negative streak, which began in December 2025 and has cumulatively destroyed 16,756 net businesses.

So the honest reading is: registrations are falling, exits are falling faster, and the net bleed is narrowing. The ecosystem is contracting, but the contraction is decelerating.

One caution on this number, stated plainly: the streak statistic is measured only from July 2024, the earliest month with trustworthy exit data, and the source itself notes it is not comparable to the full historical record and must not be described as an all-time record.

Where the surviving activity is

The regional picture confirms that this is a Bucharest phenomenon as much as a sectoral one. The capital registered 2,276 businesses in August — 28.1% of the entire country. Ilfov followed at 567. The sector concentration and the geographic concentration are the same story told twice: when the national field narrows, the capital’s share mechanically inflates.

The growth counties, meanwhile, are the wrong counties to build a recovery on. The only county in the top ten by growth with a positive year-over-year figure was Vaslui, at +5.0% — on a base of 80 registrations, rising to 84. Every other county in the growth ranking is there because it fell less than its peers: Teleorman −11.11%, Covasna −25.0%, Ialomița −32.84%, Mehedinți −33.72%. This is a leaderboard of least-bad outcomes.

The churn numbers in the provinces are the genuinely alarming ones, and they get no headline at all. Constanța’s churn rate hit 150.81% and Bihor’s 149.17% — far above Bucharest’s comparatively healthy 78.38%. Constanța registered 248 businesses and shed 374. Bihor registered 240 and shed 358. Outside the capital, the register is being consumed faster than it is being replenished.

The verdict

Transport’s leap to the top of Romania’s August sector table is a genuine first in the nine-year record, and it does mark a real structural shift in the composition of new business formation — a shift toward the asset-light, low-barrier end of the economy as heavier commitments retreat.

But it is not evidence of a transport boom. Transport’s absolute numbers are flat-to-declining across the decade, and this August’s 1,515 is lower than August 2025’s 1,612 and August 2022’s 1,658. Its share tripled against a national denominator that has halved.

The concentration that raised the alarm is therefore best described as a measurement of everything else’s weakness, not of transport’s strength. The sector that looks like a champion is simply the one standing in the least demolished part of the field — and the 12-month moving average, now at 12,627 and falling, shows the field continues to shrink.

The next August will tell us whether transport holds its artificial crown. On current trajectories, it will — because nothing else is in a position to take it.