Don’t let Europe’s businesses perish with their founders

European competitiveness is not just about start-ups and unicorns. It is also about keeping millions of established, viable businesses alive and thriving as they pass to a new generation. The policy tools exist. What has been missing so far is political will and coordination among national governments.

Picture a precision engineering firm: 40 years old, 60 employees, a full order book and an owner ready to retire.

Despite navigating multiple crises over the last two decades, the business remains healthy. Yet, because the transfer process is too complex, too costly and too poorly supported, it closes. Sixty jobs gone. Decades of expertise lost. A community a little hollower than before. Across Europe, this is happening every single day and it is entirely avoidable.

Approximately 450,000 businesses employing around two million people change hands across the EU each year. Roughly a third of these transfers are estimated to fail, jeopardising up to 600,000 jobs. Just because the conditions for a successful handover were not in place. Europe simply cannot afford to let these viable, productive enterprises perish.

It is time to put business transfer at the heart of Europe’s competitiveness agenda and to ensure that chambers of commerce and industry are recognised and resourced as the frontline partners in making it happen. 

The competitiveness blind spot

When European policymakers talk about competitiveness, they reach instinctively for the language of innovation: start-ups, unicorns, venture capital. While undeniably of enormous importance, newly emerging businesses with high growth potential represent only one dimension of a healthy economy. Growth on a broader scale is not only about creating new companies from scratch. It is equally about enabling existing ones to continue, evolve, scale and pursue new opportunities under new ownership, positively impacting their respective regions and local territories. 

As the baby boomer generation retires en masse, Europe faces an unprecedented wave of ownership transitions. Especially in rural and post-industrial areas, the loss of a locally anchored manufacturer, logistics firm, or service provider does not just affect employment figures; it erodes the social and economic fabric of entire communities. Business transfer is an overlooked pillar of the competitiveness agenda. Continuing to ignore it would be a costly mistake.

A welcome step – now member states must deliver

Eurochambres and our network of chambers across Europe welcome the new European Commission Recommendation to member states on business transfer. This is long overdue, as the last substantive EU framework on this topic dates back to 1994. Over 30 years, the demographic and economic landscape has transformed beyond recognition while policy attention has faded rather than grown.

A new Recommendation can set the direction for harmonising fiscal and administrative frameworks, mandating comprehensive data collection at the European level and establishing shared instruments such as an EU-wide business transfer barometer and a European expert platform to identify and circulate best practices.

450,000 businesses employing around two million people change hands across the EU each year

But the Commission can only set the framework. The hard work falls to member states and their track record on this has not been encouraging. 

Now the ball is firmly in member states’ court and they must act on it with genuine ambition.

Chambers are ready – Europe needs a pan-European ecosystem

Chambers of commerce and industry are already demonstrating what is possible. In France, they run structured programmes pairing retiring owners with young entrepreneurs, with particular focus on rural areas. Chambers provide platforms such as Transentreprise, which lists available premises and businesses. In addition, in order to make the business transfer-takeover process more professional and secure, the network of French chambers also offers training courses, in particular through two state-recognised certifications.

In Germany, chamber networks maintain transfer databases connecting sellers with buyers and provide mentoring throughout the handover.

In Italy, chambers facilitate the promotion of ‘continuity of enterprises’ by offering legal and administrative support and coordinating registers and databases of enterprises.

In Luxembourg, the chamber ‘House of Entrepreneurship’ acts as a one-stop shop for SMEs and offers legal, financial and strategic guidance for handover processes.

In the Nordic countries, purpose-built transfer forums – convening chambers, banks, legal advisors and regional agencies – have created local ecosystems of support that any European region should aspire to replicate.

Despite these examples being proof of concept, regional fragmentation remains a steep obstacle. An entrepreneur’s chances of a successful transfer depend more on where they happen to be registered than on the quality of their business. That is not the single market we aspire to build. Cross-border transfers, which could serve as a powerful engine of single market integration, remain exceptional rather than routine.

That is why Eurochambres is calling for a structured pan-European business transfer ecosystem: a coordinated network of national and regional platforms, underpinned by EU funding in the next EU budget, with chambers formally recognised as anchor institutions in its delivery.

Business transfer must also be explicitly integrated into support measures for start-ups and scale-ups because acquiring and growing an established business is every bit as entrepreneurial as starting from scratch  and, often, far more impactful for the communities that depend on it.

The companies are there. So are the successors

Supporting business transfer accelerates Europe’s transformation agenda. A new generation taking over an established business brings fresh ideas, new technologies and the drive to modernise. Facilitating these transitions is one of the most direct routes to the digitalisation, decarbonisation  and scaling of European SMEs into the mid-cap champions our economy needs.

The 2026 Recommendation is a test of whether Europe’s commitment to its smaller businesses and industrial fabric goes beyond words.

The companies are there. The successors are there. The chambers are there. What is needed now is the political will and the European framework to bring them together.

Vladimír Dlouhý is president of Euro­-chambres and William Spiteri Bailey is president of The Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry.