EXCLUSIVE QUARTERLY REPORT - Romania’s business ecosystem is showing troubling signs of distress, with the second quarter of 2025 revealing a pattern of business closures that consistently outpaced new registrations in two of the three months analyzed, despite superficial growth figures that mask deeper structural problems.

Quarterly Performance: Net Business Losses Signal Economic Strain

The April-June period paints a concerning picture of Romania’s entrepreneurial landscape. While July showed a modest net gain of 1,059, this positive figure comes after two consecutive months of net losses that wiped out thousands of enterprises from the market.

May 2025 registered a staggering net loss of 1,958 as 14,837 companies exited the market compared to only 12,879,, meaning for every 100 new businesses registered,.

This pattern suggests that Romania’s business environment is becoming increasingly hostile,, suggesting many Romanians are turning to freelance work as traditional employment opportunities diminish.

Meanwhile, and 76.92, indicating a retreat from more substantial business ventures.

The disappearance of several entity types—including SC, RA, and GIE—from the registration data entirely suggests a shrinking of Romania’s business diversity and sophistication.

Industry Concentration Creates Economic Vulnerability

The quarterly analysis reveals dangerous concentration in just a few sectors,, but this represents a worrying over-reliance on a single industry

• Wholesale and retail trade dominated registrations across all three months, suggesting limited innovation and diversification
• Agriculture showed consistent declines of 23-30% across the quarter, raising food security concerns
• Manufacturing declined by 6.81-12.37% year-over-year, indicating Romania’s industrial base is shrinking

The disappearance of entire industry categories from year-over-year comparisons—including education, real estate transactions, and healthcare—suggests either data reporting issues or catastrophic sectoral collapses.

Lifecycle Events: The Silent Business Massacre

The business exit data reveals a disturbing trend of companies failing to survive. July alone saw 14,109, including 7,144 deregistrations and 5,136 dissolutions. This pattern of rapid business failure suggests systemic problems in Romania’s economic environment, including potentially high regulatory burdens, limited access to capital,—this growth must be viewed in context. The comparison period (July 2024) was unusually weak with only 6,968 registrations,, but this improvement may be temporary and seasonal rather than indicative of lasting recovery.

Conclusion: A Fragile Recovery at Best

Romania’s Q2 2025 business registration data reveals an economy at a crossroads. While July showed some improvement, the quarter as a whole demonstrated significant vulnerability with net business losses in two months and dangerously high churn rates. The shift toward individual entrepreneurship and concentration in limited sectors creates economic fragility that could prove problematic in any downturn.

The data suggests Romania’s business environment requires urgent attention to address the underlying causes of rapid business failure and to encourage more diverse, sustainable enterprise development. Without intervention, the current patterns could lead to long-term economic stagnation and reduced competitiveness in the European market.

This quarterly analysis reveals that behind the headline growth figures lies a business ecosystem struggling with survival rates that threaten Romania’s economic future.