According to the conclusion of an article published on the Handelsblatt website leasing is becoming more and more popular with small and medium-sized entities. In smaller companies it is very often seen as an alternative to traditional forms of external financing. This fact is underlined by the “Mind – Mittelstand in Deutschland” study which was scientifically supervised by the IfM Bonn institute. According to the study´s latest findings from 2005 almost 41 percent of SMEs make use of leasing. Other studies by the IfM Bonn arrived at even higher percentages.
The following figures were found out by the Mind study: The kind of leasing mostly used by SMEs is car leasing. 87.5 percent of all SMEs, apart from other things, lease one or more cars, and this tendency is strongly rising. The same figure had only stood at 58.7 percent in the year 2001. The leasing of office, IT and electronic data processing equipment is becoming more important as well. In 2001 25 percent of all leasing contracts related to this kind of objects. In 2005 this figure had already reached 33.2 percent. By this same year 12.9 percent of all SMEs had also passed lease agreements on production lines and machines, whereas in 2001 this figure was only 9.6 percent. With regard to business premises and office buildings, 3.7 and 7.6 percent of SMEs had leased them by the year 2001 and 2005 respectively.
Further details can be gathered from the original article on the Handelsblatt website.