The composition question, answered

Romania registered 8,103 new businesses in August 2026. Transport and warehousing remained the largest single sector with 1,515 registrations — an 18.7% share of the month’s total. That is the headline, and it is the least interesting part of the story.

The question worth asking is whether August’s mix of sectors looks like the preceding months or like something new. Across the five largest sectors, the answer is: mostly stable, with one exception — Information and Communications, which quietly moved up the ranking.

Transport’s share: high, but no longer accelerating

Transport has led every month this year. But its share of total registrations has not been constant:

• March: 16.8% (2,419 of 14,438)
• April: 15.3% (1,933 of 12,639)
• May: 14.1% (1,755 of 12,427)
• June: 18.3% (2,061 of 11,277)
• July: 20.9% (2,307 of 11,049)
• August: 18.7% (1,515 of 8,103)

The pattern is a June–July expansion followed by a partial step back in August. Transport’s August share sits well above its spring level but below July’s peak. In absolute terms, transport registrations fell 34.3% from July to August, steeper than the 26.66% decline in total registrations over the same period. So transport did not just shrink with the market — it shrank slightly faster than it.

That is the strongest evidence against the idea that August represents a transport-led rotation. Transport is the anchor of the register, not the thing moving it.

The real shift: IT and Communications

The one sector where August looks genuinely different is Information and Communications. It registered 833 businesses, which is 10.3% of the month’s total. That is its highest share of any month since at least March, and it moved the sector past Construction into fourth place — reversing July’s ordering, when Construction (1,021) was ahead of IT at 971.

Two things make this notable. First, IT’s August decline from July was only 14.2% (971 to 833), against a 26.66% drop for the register as a whole. Second, its year-over-year change is the mildest of any large sector: Information and Communications is down just 2.69% from August 2025, while Transport is down 6.02% and Retail is down 38.11%.

This is not a boom. Eight hundred and thirty-three registrations is below the 1,136 recorded in April and the 1,140 recorded in January. What IT shows is relative resilience rather than growth: on a year-over-year basis it is the only one of the top five sectors within single digits of its 2025 level.

Retail: the quiet structural decline

The sector with the clearest deterioration is wholesale and retail trade, where August registrations of 1,171 stand 38.11% below August 2025’s 1,892.

The gap is persistent rather than sudden: retail was down 29.99% year over year in July, 13.28% in June and 18.16% in May. This is a steady erosion, not an August event, and Retail’s share has held remarkably flat at roughly 14.4% in each of the last three months. Share stability with falling volumes means retail is shrinking in step with the overall register rather than losing ground to other sectors.

Professional services: losing share slowly

Professional, scientific and technical activities registered 852 businesses in August, a 10.5% share. Its share has drifted down from 10.9% in March to 10.5%, and its year-over-year decline of 22.47% is steeper than transport’s.

The drift is mild but consistent. Professional services is not gaining ground on transport; it is conceding a little. But the concession is small relative to the gap between transport (18.7%) and professional services (10.5%) at the top of the table.

Construction: the share that keeps creeping up

Construction registered 788 in August, 9.7% of the total. Its share has risen from 8.9% in March to 9.7% now, one of the few sectors posting a sequential share gain. In absolute terms it is still far below March’s 1,281, and its year-over-year decline of 33.05% is severe. The rising share reflects a market shrinking faster than construction is, not construction strength.

The exits story changes what these numbers mean

Sector composition in August has to be read against a register that is contracting outright. Total exits reached 8,744 in August — 1,015 suspensions, 3,198 dissolutions and 4,531 deregistrations — against 8,103 registrations. That yields a churn rate of 107.91% and net growth of minus 641.

August is the ninth consecutive month of negative net growth, a run that began in December 2025 and has accumulated a net loss of 16,756 businesses. It is also among the mildest months of that run — second only to February 2026’s minus 119 — and net growth has now improved for three straight months from April’s minus 3,018.

Exits are falling faster than registrations are. Dissolutions are down 31.0% year over year and deregistrations down 19.0%. That is what is narrowing the gap. It is a mild positive, but it comes from fewer closures rather than more openings.

A seasonal caveat worth stating

August is historically the second-weakest calendar month for registrations, with a mean of 10,681 versus 13,289 in March. The fall from July to August is therefore partly the expected summer pattern. But August 2026’s total sits below the August norm, and the 29.14% year-over-year decline is far larger than any seasonal effect would explain.

Where the sectors sit geographically

Registrations remain heavily concentrated: Bucharest alone accounted for 2,276 of August’s 8,103, or 28.1%, with Ilfov adding 567 (7.0%). No county outside the top ten exceeds a 2.3% share.

The regional growth picture is uniformly weak. The single county posting year-over-year growth in August was Vaslui, at 5.0%, on a base of just 80 registrations in August 2025. Every other county in the top-ten growth list is negative, from Teleorman’s minus 11.11% down to Tulcea’s minus 48.44%.

Bucharest’s own entity mix matters for interpreting the sector data. Its 2,276 registrations split 1,185 SRLs to 1,083 PFAs — near parity, and far more PFA-heavy than Ilfov, where 426 of 567 were SRLs. Individual-enterprise activity is disproportionately a capital-city phenomenon, and PFAs have held up far better than SRLs nationally: PFA registrations fell only 1.9% year over year while SRLs fell 41.95%.

The conclusion

August’s sector mix is not a rotation. Transport’s 18.7% share is lower than July’s 20.9% but higher than any month from April through June, and its absolute decline outpaced the market. Professional services lost a fraction of a point of share and remains a distant second. Retail’s share is flat, even as its volume sits well below last year’s level.

The genuine compositional change is IT and Communications moving ahead of Construction into fourth place, and doing so on the mildest year-over-year decline of any large sector. That is a shift measured in tenths of a percentage point, and it should be described as such — not as a sector turning point.

The more consequential fact about August 2026 is not which sectors grew. It is that total exits exceeded total registrations by 641, extending a nine-month run of net contraction in which the composition of what is opening matters far less than the fact that less is opening.