More companies filed for bankruptcy last year than at any time this millennium. At the same time, almost 15,000 jobs disappeared.
In many regions, the largest company to go bankrupt was in the construction industry. Overall, though, more firms collapsed in the service industries, including restaurants.
Jaakko Nors, an account manager at Suomen Asiakastieto, a provider of digital business and consumer information services, estimates that two billion euros disappeared from the Finnish national economy during the most recent wave of bankruptcies.
"That's a pretty big sum, if you think about how many new companies should be founded to cover that gap," Nors told Yle.
The largest number of lost jobs were in Helsinki, almost 3,800. Proportionally though, the blow was much harder in some rural municipalities.
For instance in Pyhäntä, Northern Ostrobothnia, about a quarter of the jobs with local firms were lost due to bankruptcies. One of the country’s biggest bankruptcies last year took place there when the homebuilding firm Jukkatalo collapsed.
Local knock-on effects
Juhana Brotherus, Director and Chief Economist at the Suomen Yrittäjät, the Finnish SME association, emphasises the local knock-on effects of last year's bankruptcies, pointing to the Jukkatalo failure.
"In that bankruptcy, 28 percent of the municipality's jobs disappeared. In other words, the differences between regions or municipalities can be very large," he noted.
On the other hand, according to Brotherus, bankruptcies do not have a big impact on Finland's gross national product.
He blamed that latest wave of business collapses on high interest rates, inflation and a general drop in demand.
Many of those in the construction industry whose employers filed for bankruptcy have since started their own small companies.
Almost 800 companies in the field collapsed, some of them major employers in their local areas. Meanwhile nearly 1,600 new companies were created in the sector last year, according to Suomen Asiakastieto.
Last month, Statistics Finland reported that more companies had gone under in the preceding year than in any other 12-month period for a quarter-century.
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