The owner turns sixty: the question of succession

In brief. Official statistics on the age of Russian business owners are absent — the first thing worth knowing when reading any percentage on this subject. What is established is different: the overwhelming majority of Russian private companies were founded by the first generation in the 1990s and early 2000s, transfer to heirs remains a rare scenario, and the number of publicly reported M&A transactions in the country runs to the hundreds per year. The gap between the number of companies facing a change of owner and the market's capacity is the central fact of this paper.

What sits beyond the reach of statistics

Rosstat and the Federal Tax Service publish economic indicators for enterprises; the demographics of their owners fall outside the scope of observation. An individual's date of birth is entered in the register on incorporation and is classified as restricted-access information: it stays outside open register extracts and open data sets.

Any publication quoting a precise share of owners over sixty therefore rests on a survey, on one bank's client base, or on an estimate. We use such sources and label them — and we recommend treating other people's figures the same way.

What the surveys show

The most widely cited study of Russian family business is the PwC Global Family Business Survey. The Russian section of the 2016 edition recorded the following owner responses:

Indicator	Russia	Global
Plan to sell the business in whole or in part	39%	17%
Plan to pass the business to heirs	11%	39%
Hold a formal written succession plan	6%	15%
Companies under first-generation control	85%	≈60%

The data is ten years old, and we say so directly. Its value lies in the ratio: the Russian picture is the mirror image of the global one. Where owners elsewhere plan to pass the business to their children, in Russia they plan to sell. And in one further respect: over the intervening decade the owners have aged by exactly ten years.

The arithmetic is simpler than any survey: a company founded in 1995 by a thirty-five-year-old belongs today to someone past sixty.

How many such companies there are

A precise sample for the RUB 300m – 5bn turnover band is absent from open sources: the official classification divides business at different thresholds. The nearest verifiable reference point is the Federal Tax Service's Unified Register of Small and Medium Enterprises: as at the update of 10 July 2026 it recorded around 24,000 medium-sized enterprises. That is under 0.4% of all SMEs in the register — and precisely the part where a change of owner becomes a transaction.

To this is added a layer of companies that fall within our turnover range while sitting outside the register's «medium enterprise» criteria. Sizing that layer requires a query against the state financial reporting resource; a published aggregate figure for it is so far absent.

How many transactions the market absorbs

According to the AK&M agency, in 2025 the Russian M&A market recorded 399 transactions with an aggregate value of $41.12bn — 20% fewer by number and 24.6% lower by value than the year before. A third of all transactions (33.8%) fell in the band below $10m. The average transaction value excluding the largest deals was $67.9m, and that figure rose by almost 15%.

The picture that emerges: the market contracted overall while the average transaction grew larger. The money on the buy side remained; the requirements on documentation rose.

The comparison. A few hundred publicly reported transactions a year across the whole country, against tens of thousands of companies facing a change of owner within a foreseeable horizon. Unreported transactions are many times more numerous, and the order of magnitude holds: the market's capacity remains many times smaller than the need.

Four scenarios and their cost

Scenario	What it requires	How it usually ends
Pass to an heir	an heir prepared to manage; a transfer plan; several years working side by side	works where preparation started early; an abrupt transfer destroys a business faster than a sale
Appoint a manager	a management system, reporting, controls, incentives	the owner keeps ownership and hands over operating control; the scenario runs where reporting is already in place
Sell	a prepared asset, a valuation document, a buyer universe, 6–12 months	the only scenario that gives the owner money and an exit at the same time
Close	the owner's decision	assets go at liquidation value; the intangible part — clients, team, reputation — goes to zero

Why «another couple of years» is an expensive strategy

Deferral looks free and carries a cost that stays outside any report:

The asset ages with its owner. Equipment, leases, key staff and client relationships all have a term. After three years a company is rarely worth more in real terms — more often it is worth the same on higher turnover.
Dependence on the owner grows. The longer the owner personally holds the clients, the suppliers and the decisions, the larger the discount: the buyer is pricing a business whose functioning rests on the seller.
Preparation takes six months upwards. Putting the ownership structure in order, assembling three years of accounts and regularising title takes months. A rushed sale costs less than a prepared one.
Health and family circumstances arrive outside the plan. A sale under pressure of circumstance is the weakest negotiating position available, and the buyer can see it.

An owner sells a business once in a lifetime. The buyer sitting opposite is doing it for the fifth time, or the twentieth.

Where to start while the decision is being weighed

Establish the order of value. The market sets the reference point and a valuation does the arithmetic. It is useful even where the decision is to hold: it shows what creates value.
Separate the owner from the business. Everything tied personally to the owner — clients, suppliers, banking relationships, decisions — is converted into process. This is the longest part of the preparation and the most expensive to defer.
Assemble the perimeter. Equipment, land, buildings and title should sit where they can be sold as a single package.
Put the accounts in order. Management reality and statutory accounts should converge as far as they can. Divergence is the principal source of discount.
Decide what happens to the money. The tax structure of the transaction and the question of residency are settled before signing, while the choice is still open.

What we do here

Valuation, bringing an asset into saleable form, buyer search and transaction support — the M&A practice. The tax map and structure — capital and structuring. What happens to the money and the owner afterwards — private clients.

Sources

AK&M information agency. «Mergers and Acquisitions Market» bulletin, 2025 results (issue 334, January 2026). Press release publicly available at mergers.akm.ru.
PwC. Global Family Business Survey 2016, Russian sample. The Russian-language report was withdrawn from pwc.ru after 2022; the global English report remains available at pwc.com.
Federal Tax Service of Russia. Unified Register of Small and Medium Enterprises, update of 10 July 2026 (ofd.nalog.ru).
Federal Law No. 129-FZ of 8 August 2001 on state registration of legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, Article 6 — on the composition of restricted-access information.

This material is informational and serves a reference purpose. Decisions on a specific transaction are taken on the basis of documents and together with a specialist adviser: every situation requires separate analysis.