SMEs, less investments expected in 2023. Uncertainty holds back businesses
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Uncertainty. This is the word that summarizes the sentiment of craft businesses and SMEs for the year that has just begun. After a 2022 of post-Covid consolidation, a set of different factors ranging from the energy shock, to inflation up to the international tensions generated by the Ukrainian conflict, do not in fact allow entrepreneurs to have a serene look at the future.
Business forecasts for 2023
From a survey of a sample of 927 companies, just carried out by the National Confederation of Crafts and Small and Medium Enterprises, on prospects, it came out that as many as six out of ten (61%) have difficulty formulating a forecast on the performance of the Italian economy. Among the rest, the share of those who expect twelve months of difficulty far exceeds that of those who believe that Italy will continue to grow. Dario Costantini, national president of the Cna, explains that «war, high energy prices and inflation are reasons of great concern for our businesses. The sharply increasing uncertainty leads companies to prudence with the consequence of cutting investments. It therefore becomes essential to ground the resources of the Pnrr and maintain facilitation tools such as eco-bonuses, transition 4.0 and Nuova Sabatini. We are also relaunching our proposal to create a fund to encourage investments in small plants for the production of energy from renewable sources by exploiting the warehouses of SMEs”.
The propensity to invest decreases
If this is the sentiment towards GDP, when entrepreneurs look inside their companies the picture becomes clearer and a little less negative. The area of those who speak of uncertainty narrows to 37.2% of the total, a good 25 less than that of the Italian economy, and there is a substantial balance between those who believe that 2023 will be a satisfactory year for their activities (29.8%) and those who think the opposite (33%). However, all this is not enough to create momentum for investment and employment. For the next twelve months, in fact, almost 4 out of 10 interviewed (39.5%) declare that they want to reduce investments: 27.4% speak of a decrease and 12.1% of a sharp reduction. 45.7% will keep them stable and about 14% will increase them. On employment, the majority is cautious: 12.2% say they will increase headcount, 66.5% will keep them stable and 21.1%, therefore more than one in five, will reduce them. By combining the data relating to employment and investments, it is clear that for entrepreneurs this is a phase that does not offer certainties about the future and therefore it is better to opt for a wait-and-see strategy.
The most critical factors
According to the CNA, among the government’s priorities there must also be “another critical issue that emerges from our investigation, namely the difficulty of companies in finding specialized personnel”, observes Costantini. This could in fact be among the factors that will have the most negative impact on activities, together with high energy prices and inflationary tensions. However, the list of reasons for concern is longer and also includes the continuation of international political instability, the failure to implement the investments envisaged in the Pnrr and the worsening of credit access conditions. All factors which, put together, according to the companies interviewed in the Cna survey, could have a negative impact on the performance of their business and the Italian economy. On the other hand, a possible resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic does not seem to arouse particular fears.
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