Swiss family firms that hand over within the family are 40% less likely to be sold

Neuchâtel, 27 September 2026 – More than 2,000 Swiss AGs and GmbHs a year publish a board change in which one person leaves and a relative with the same surname takes the seat. In 2025 there were 2,474, the most since 2017. What follows is the finding: in the seven years after a family handover, 6.7% of these companies were absorbed by another company or became the target of a recorded deal, against 11.2% of companies with a comparable board change in the same month, canton and legal form. That is the result of the first backtest of family succession in the Swiss commercial register, based on 1.3 million board-change notices published in the SOGC since 2016.

• The gap holds in every cut: without the 100 most common surnames (×0.54 at five years), when the chair or managing director hands over (×0.46), and among owner-managed GmbHs where the capital itself passed to the relative: 1.8% sold within seven years, against 5.1%.
• Most family handovers are not from parent to child. Judged by first names (BFS statistics), only 34% go to a person at least 15 years younger; in 38% there is no age gap at all, which points to spouses and siblings.
• Women are 22% of next-generation successors, up from 19.9% in 2017 to 23.1% in 2025 and 26.4% so far in 2026.
• Valais (78.8 handovers per 1,000 companies with a board change), Bern (71.0) and Jura (67.1) hand over the most; Zug (23.4) the least. When the family leaves the board again after a handover, which happens in 18% of cases within seven years, a sale within two years becomes 1.6 times as likely.

«Buyers of Swiss SMEs talk about the succession gap as if every owner were waiting for an offer. The register shows the opposite for thousands of firms each year: once a relative takes the seat, the company largely leaves the market. For a searcher that is useful information, because it tells you where not to call, and the rare handover that fails tells you where to call next.»

Background

A family handover is counted when, in the same SOGC notice, one person leaves the board or management and a different person with the same surname is entered. The register does not state family relationships, and it shows the board, not the shareholders of an AG, so share sales of AGs are not visible; sale rates are therefore lower bounds for both groups alike. French-language notices from Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel and Fribourg are read less completely, so these cantons are not ranked. Sex and generation are estimated from first names with the Federal Statistical Office's first-name statistics (2024).