How 3 years of war have affected small and medium-sized businesses: trends among individual entrepreneurs
Kyiv • UNN
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, 763,759 new individual entrepreneurs (FOP) have opened, and 684,995 have closed. The most popular sectors are retail trade and IT, and the share of women entrepreneurs has grown to 61%.
Over 3 years of war in Ukraine, 763,759 new individual entrepreneurs (FOP) have opened, while 684,995 have closed. The most popular areas are retail, IT and wholesale trade, and the share of women entrepreneurs has grown to 61%, according to data from the Opendatabot monitoring service, writes UNN.
Details
"763,759 new individual entrepreneurs (FOP) have opened in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale [invasion]. At the same time, 684,995 entrepreneurs decided to close their businesses over the past 3 years", - the message says.
The top 3 areas chosen by new entrepreneurs during the war:
- retail trade - 28%
- IT - 9%
- wholesale trade - 7%.
It is worth noting that before the full-scale invasion, almost twice as many new IT individual entrepreneurs were registered per month.
Compared to the period before the start of the full-scale [invasion], the number of new cases in the field of postal and courier activities has tripled. The number of new individual entrepreneurs related to education has increased 2.6 times, and in the field of finance - 2.5 times.
Over three years, the share of women entrepreneurs has grown from 40% to 61%. The largest share of women entrepreneurs among new individual entrepreneurs is in Khmilnytskyi (60.5%), Kirovohrad (60.1%) and Poltava (59.4%) regions. Women more often open businesses in the service, education and clothing production sectors, while men dominate in construction, transport and logistics.
The largest number of new individual entrepreneurs during the major war was registered in Kyiv - 108,536, in Dnipropetrovsk region (68,377) and Lviv region (60,009). The opening of new businesses has noticeably decreased in the frontline and partially occupied regions: Luhansk, Kherson and Donetsk regions. The number of new entrepreneurs has increased in Rivne (+25%), Ivano-Frankivsk (+10%) and Chernihiv (+10%) regions.
Despite the risks of war, the individual entrepreneur economy was breaking all records: more individual entrepreneurs were opening than closing each month. However, the situation changed at the end of 2024. The anti-record was set in January 2025: 61,455 individual entrepreneurs were closed. In comparison, only 21,358 entrepreneurs opened their own businesses.
In total, individual entrepreneurs paid 126 billion UAH in taxes over almost 3 years of the full-scale [invasion]. The amount of the single tax paid by entrepreneurs is growing year by year, except for 2022. Last year, the amount of single tax revenues was 1.6 times higher than in 2021: 55.1 billion UAH versus 34.8 billion UAH.
