[welterde]

There are 2M sole proprietorships in Germany and around 0.4M partnership type companies (Personengesellschaft; GbR, etc.) and aside from the aspect of trying to appear like a large corporation while actually being a small start-up, they are perfectly adequate for many businesses.

There is also no limit on how large a sole proprietorship can grow. While mostly held up as example for why one might not want to keep the company form a sole proprietorship forever, Schlecker scaled from a single shop to over 14000 stores near the end and a couple billion euro revenue per year.