Silent Deindustrialization: the Missing Successor Ecosystem

7 min. read

Germany loses economic substance every year without anyone accounting for it. Around 114.000 mid-sized companies plan to shut down rather than hand over their businesses annually, and among them are industrial firms whose production expertise no subsidy promise can bring back.

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A Gap No One Accounts For

Economic location policy attention is almost entirely focused on new ventures. Incubators, venture capital, university programs: there is a functioning network for getting off the ground. For succession planning, nothing comparable exists.

The real substance problem lies in the transition. This perspective is gaining traction in the industrial debate, and the numbers back it up. According to the KfW Succession Monitoring 2025, around 114.000 mid-sized companies plan to shut down each year, while roughly 109.000 search for a successor annually. The IfM Bonn expects 186.000 handovers between 2026 and 2030. For the first time, more owners are planning an exit than a transfer.

Each of these companies holds knowledge that isn’t captured in any manual. How an alloy reacts under load. What tolerance a machine can truly maintain. Which supplier delivers during a crisis. This knowledge is the production foundation that Deep-Tech ambitions must build upon. If it disappears in small increments, it will be missing when scaling is needed.

Why Consolidation Is Not Happening

The obvious market solution would be Buy-and-Build: A buyer consolidates several small businesses into a larger, more powerful unit. This happens far too rarely in the mid-sized business sector. Three structural reasons are standing in the way.

1. The Valuation Gap. According to KfW, sellers’ price expectations have risen by about 34 percent since 2019, while buyers are calculating more cautiously. Many conversations end before due diligence even begins.

2. Information Asymmetry. Those who want to sell rarely appear on public lists. The market is opaque, and the search is expensive and time-consuming. Exactly this effort deters institutional buyers who need predictable pipelines.

3. Integration Effort. Small businesses rely on their owner and a handful of key employees. Anyone who consolidates too quickly risks destroying exactly the know-how they wanted to acquire. Governance complexity increases with every acquisition.

In the DACH reality, a fourth hurdle arises that rarely appears in Anglo-Saxon Buy-and-Build models: co-determination. Already with five eligible employees, a works council can be formed; in larger units, depending on the legal form, co-determination at the supervisory board level comes into play. Consolidating multiple businesses merges more than just balance sheets: employee structures, collective bargaining agreements, and established co-determination cultures come together. An investor who treats this as a mere formal integration process underestimates the resistance that can paralyze a platform for years. Those who take it seriously plan for works councils and key personnel as stakeholders long before the first purchase contract is signed.

Take the Counterargument Seriously

A legitimate objection is: The market already regulates this. Healthy businesses find buyers, weak ones disappear, and that’s economically clean. There’s some truth to this argument, and it deserves an honest response.

The catch lies in the time horizon. A machine builder with forty employees and a well-established production line cannot be rebuilt within two years once it has closed. What the market built over decades can disappear faster than it can be rebuilt.

Compounding this is a clustering effect that individual case studies often overlook. A closed supplier creates a gap in the supply chain for those who ordered from them. If a critical mass of specialized manufacturers closes in a region, an entire cluster loses its depth. Furthermore, the support logic is misaligned: it subsidizes new startups with high failure rates, while leaving functioning entities behind during the transition. From many small, individually insignificant closures, a structural break emerges with warning signs.

What an Ecosystem Response Should Achieve

Another incentive program does not solve the problem. What is needed is infrastructure for the transition, similarly organized as the startup network. Three levers are concrete.

First, transparency: a reliable, curated access to ready-to-transfer businesses, which visibly shortens the lengthy hidden search. Second, bridging instruments: earn-outs and seller loans that bridge the valuation gap and shift risk to where better information resides. Third, transfer competence: structured knowledge transfers that secure the silent know-how before the owner leaves.

First building blocks are already emerging in the market. Search funds and specialized M&A platforms organize the search professionally and have completed first acquisitions among German-speaking mid-sized companies in recent years. Yet they cater to the upper end, businesses with an EBITDA of about one million euros or more, for which the search and structuring effort is justified. The long tail of smaller specialist manufacturers, which is decisive for industrial depth, falls through this grid. Exactly there is where the difference is made between a managed transition and a silent loss of value.

The first 90 days decide, even before any acquisition. Which cluster of neighboring businesses creates an industrial logic, which know-how is worth protecting, and which key personnel must remain on board. A clear answer to these questions separates the building of a sustainable platform from the costly purchase on speculation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Image source: AI-generated (June 2026), C2PA certificate embedded in the image

Translated from the German original using artificial intelligence. The German version is authoritative.