Most companies don’t fail loudly. They just… stop.
No dramatic headlines. No press conferences. They file their last accounts, miss a deadline or two, and quietly get struck off. Companies House processed over 400,000 dissolutions last year. That’s not a rounding error — that’s a city the size of Bristol, gone from the register in 12 months.
But here’s what the aggregate number hides: dissolution isn’t evenly distributed.
Hospitality and food service companies dissolve at roughly 3-4x the rate of professional services firms. Retail sits uncomfortably in the middle, trending worse since 2022. Construction remains chronically high — not just insolvencies, but voluntary dissolutions too, which often tell a quieter version of the same story. Meanwhile, certain sub-sectors within tech and business services show dissolution rates that would embarrass most people’s assumptions about “safe” industries.
Why does this matter beyond morbid curiosity?
If you’re selling into a high-dissolution sector, a meaningful chunk of your pipeline is statistically likely to disappear before they become long-term customers. If you’re investing, sector-level dissolution trends are a leading indicator that point-in-time financials often miss. If you’re a lender or insurer, pricing risk without this data is essentially guesswork dressed up in spreadsheets.
The pattern is always visible in the data before it becomes visible in the news. Company ages, filing behaviour, SIC code clusters — it’s all there.
Borsch.ai pulls dissolution and filing data across 5.68 million UK companies, so you can spot sector stress before it lands on your desk as a bad debt or a lost client.
Start reading the signals: https://borsch.ai
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