Legal concept of ‘enterprise’ in the light of changes in commercial legislation

The article deals with the concept of enterprise as a legal category. According to the traditional approach, an enterprise is a business entity which has the status of a legal entity and may exist in various organisational and legal forms. At the same time, current Ukrainian legislation identifies an enterprise with a single property complex. This dual approach needs to be corrected, as the same legal term should not be used in different meanings. This dual approach should be corrected in the process of legislative recodification, which is currently being worked on by legal scholars. Certain steps have been taken with the adoption in 2025 of the Law of Ukraine defining the specifics of regulating the activities of certain types of legal entities and their associations for the transitional period. In this Law, the term ‘enterprise’ is used exclusively for state-owned, treasury and municipal enterprises; and the enterprise is separated from other types of legal entities, in particular from business associations. The Law provides for the transitional transformation of all enterprises into the legal form of companies (entrepreneurial or non-entrepreneurial). Thus, the legislator provides for the abandonment of the concept of an enterprise as a business entity and considers it solely as a property object - a single property complex. The term ‘enterprise’ is widely used in legal acts, including bylaws, and in many cases in the same document it refers to both a business entity and property, depending on the context of the legal provision. Therefore, the implementation of this idea in legislation will require a painstaking revision of numerous legislative acts; it will also require the reorganisation of information databases, primarily the Unified State Register of Enterprises and Organisations of Ukraine. At the same time, the established meaning of the term ‘enterprise’ definitely connects it with legal entities engaged in economic activity. Excluding ‘enterprise-subject’ from the legal terminology would require extraordinary organisational, intellectual and financial efforts, and therefore seems unjustified. To avoid a double approach to the interpretation of the concept of enterprise, it is advisable to retain the status of a business entity, without identifying it with a single property complex.