Gyeonggi Province: Number of closures exceeds number of new businesses for the first time in six years (Korea)

The Gyeonggi-do Market Promotion Agency in South Korea began accepting applications for the "2025 Gyeonggi Market Promotion Agency" on the 30th of last month in order to mitigate the impact of the closure of small businesses in the province and to support their recovery.
The prefecture announced that it had closed applications for the "Hokkaido Small Business Reorganization Support Program" on the 21st of this month. Applications were flooded in, leading to an early closing in just 22 days.
The project provides business restructuring consulting and subsidies to small businesses in Hokkaido that are facing closure or have already gone out of business, helping them to get back on track.
The aim is to encourage those who are looking to try again. An official from the Promotion Agency explained, "We received a flood of applications at a much faster rate than we initially expected, so we had no choice but to close the application early."
This supports the fact that the number of closures in the province has exceeded the number of new businesses for the first time in the past six years, as shown in the recently published "Gyeonggi Province Small Business Economic In-SHOO Brief VOL.4."
The details of the briefing state that the closure rate of restaurants in Hokkaido in the first quarter of 2025 will be 2.85%, the highest in the past six years, while the opening rate will be 2.49%, the lowest on record.
This is the first time that the closure rate has exceeded the opening rate on a base basis. Kim Min-cheol, director of the promotion institute, said, "The early closing of the small business reorganization support program is to reduce the number of small businesses closing down in the province.
"This is the result of extremely high practical demand, coupled with an increase in the number of large-scale businesses," he said. "We are grimly aware of the signs of crisis, with the lowest opening rate and highest closure rate in the past six years.
"We will do everything we can to prevent this, formulate individual, effective policies, and protect small businesses in the prefecture."