The EPE is finished and the IKE lost first place in Greece

I counted every company formation in GEMI, the Greek General Commercial Registry, since 2016. Only legal entities, no sole proprietorships. Then I looked at which legal form people choose in Greece, and which one lasts.

Two things stood out. The limited liability company (EPE) is finished, and since 2024 the limited partnership (EE) has overtaken the private company (IKE).

Which form people choose

The columns: SA (AE), general partnership (OE), limited partnership (EE), limited liability company (EPE) and private company (IKE).

Limited partnerships took off. From 1,777 formations in 2016 to 17,075 in 2025. That is almost ten times as many.

Over the same period the IKE went from 4,846 to 15,261, three times as many. Good growth, but not at the same pace.

2024 is the year the order flips. The EE takes 36.7% of formations, the IKE 35.4%. In 2025 the gap widens: 38.1% against 34.1%.

The big turn happened within one year. From 2023 to 2024 formations went from 34,583 to 43,254, +25%, and almost all of the increase is EE and OE.

The EPE is finished. 400 formations in 2016, 244 in 2025. It is the only form with fewer formations today than ten years ago, in a decade when the total grew four times over.

Which form lasts

You cannot compare survival across cohorts of different age. A company founded in 2024 had two years in which to close. One founded in 2016 had ten.

The 2016 cohort, ten years later:

One in three companies from 2016 no longer exists as a standalone company: 7,386 out of 11,362 survived, which is 65%.

The SA clearly lasts longer. The general partnership lasts the least of all, with half of its cohort gone.

There is an obvious selection effect here. An SA costs more to set up, and the founder usually has a more serious plan. Survival is a property of the people who choose it.

Covid-era companies did not die at a higher rate

The curve is smooth. 2020 and 2021 sit exactly where their age puts them, with no dip.

Whatever the pandemic did to existing businesses, the companies founded during it do not close at a different rate from the cohorts next to them.

Methodology

The source is the GEMI search API, run on 20/07/2026. We pulled only counts, no company records. 660 queries, one for each combination of founding year, legal form and status.

Forms: SA, OE, EE, EPE, IKE. Sole proprietorships and branches of foreign companies are left out.

A company counts as "active" when its status is active. An exit is a deletion, a deletion after a merger or a split, or a dissolution with liquidation.

Checks

The identity holds. Active plus deleted plus in liquidation plus other gives the total with a deviation below 2% in all 55 pairs, typically below 0.5%.

Closures before formation. A query with closure year equal to founding year minus one found 34 records in 6 of the 55 pairs, all in cohorts up to 2017. This is a GEMI data quality issue in old migrated records, not a filter error.

Comparison with the press releases. For 2023, IKE, EE and OE agree within 3 to 7%. The SA differs by 59%, 2,775 against 1,745. The press releases count only new formations through the One-Stop Shop (YMS, the Greek fast-track company formation service). The registry also gives a new GEMI number to conversions, which are a large share of SAs.

What it does not say

It does not cover sole proprietorships. They are 64% of the Greek economy by number of businesses. They stay out because they do not have a legal form in the same sense.

A conversion looks like a death and a birth. An IKE that becomes an SA shows up as an exit in one column and a new formation in the other. IKE survival is underestimated.

Some deleted companies have no closure date in the registry, so they are missing from every query with a year filter. This is stronger in old cohorts, up to 9.4% in the OEs of 2016.

Last week's formations, by legal form and area, are on the new companies page.