Twenty thousand Swiss companies a year need a new owner

Start with the number that gets quoted most often. Dun & Bradstreet's 2024 data identifies 101,427 Swiss companies with an unresolved succession issue — roughly 16% of the Swiss SME universe. Not companies in difficulty, and not companies for sale. Companies where the question of who takes over has no answer yet.

Two other figures frame it. Research from HSG and UBS published in May 2026 estimates that more than 100,000 Swiss family businesses will undergo a generational transition by 2030. And the Confederation's own SME portal cites approximately 20,000 companies a year requiring transfer, on a five-year median.

Twenty thousand annual transfers does not mean twenty thousand companies disappear. They resolve, broadly, in four directions. The proportions are the Swiss Confederation SME portal's, taken from a Credit Suisse survey published in September 2023:

The first three add to roughly three quarters. The remaining quarter — on these proportions, something in the order of four to five thousand companies a year — has to find an owner outside the family and outside the building. That is the part worth looking at closely, and it is the part the Swiss market serves worst.

Owners in this bracket face a specific problem. Discretion and reach pull in opposite directions. Tell nobody and you find no buyer; tell the market and your employees, customers and competitors learn that you are leaving before you have decided who to. Most owners resolve the tension by waiting, which is why succession in Switzerland is so consistently planned late.

The cost of waiting is not abstract. A sale prepared over three years and a sale prepared over three months are different transactions at different prices, and the difference is rarely recoverable.

We see this from close range. A good part of our work is with owner-managed companies, and the succession conversation reaches us years before it reaches anyone else. So in 2026 we opened SME Market, a private marketplace for Swiss SME transactions, operated by IBEX SERVICES SA under Swiss law.

The design answers the tension directly. Public listings are anonymised by construction — sector, canton, revenue and EBITDA bands, headcount, founding year, deal type, and nothing that identifies the company. Every mandate carries a LOT identifier and a verification badge. Identity and beneficial ownership are checked against the Federal Commercial Register and against sanctions and politically exposed persons lists, on both sides: buyers are institutional acquirers, family offices and qualified private purchasers, and retail or speculative enquiries are declined at verification.

A buyer reaches the full dossier only by signing a per-deal non-disclosure agreement. The seller keeps the right to refuse any individual introduction. Negotiation happens directly between the parties: the platform provides the data room, the structured question-and-answer, the messaging — and stays out of the substance. It does not represent either side, does not propose terms, and never holds shares, funds or assets. Settlement runs bank to bank.

Fees are published rather than negotiated in the dark: 2.50% of total transaction value on closing, with a floor of CHF 5,000 per side, and a 24-month tail. Fiduciaries who introduce a client receive 1.25%. Under Article 400(1) CO that commission belongs to the client and not to the introducer, and disclosing it does not discharge the duty to hand it over: it may be kept only where the client, told in advance of the basis of calculation and the order of magnitude, has expressly waived it. The law prescribes no form for that waiver; proving it was given falls on whoever keeps the commission, which is why we require the introducing fiduciary to take it in writing, before the commission is paid. We wrote that condition in deliberately. An adviser's duty to their client should not be quietly worth something to us.

The tax and legal groundwork is what determines your options later, and almost all of it has to be done before a buyer appears. How the shares are held, whether the operating business and the real estate sit in the same entity, what a sale would trigger personally, whether the company can be sold at all in its current shape: these are answerable now, quietly, with nobody outside the room knowing you asked.

That conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is also the single thing that most reliably improves the outcome of a Swiss succession.

Sources

Dun & Bradstreet, 2024 data on Swiss companies with unresolved succession. HSG / UBS research published May 2026 on generational transition in Swiss family businesses. Swiss Confederation SME portal: the estimate of companies requiring transfer per year on a five-year median, and the breakdown of succession routes, which the portal takes from Credit Suisse, «Umfrage zur Unternehmensnachfolge 2022», September 2023. Platform mechanics and fee terms as published on smemarket.ch.