Spanish SMEs place inflation and the increase in energy costs as their main problems, although they have a favorable sales and employment forecast for this year. In addition, to gain competitiveness, their requests to the next Spanish Government focus on lower taxes, reduction of Social Security contributions and more aid for investments.
Specifically, 35.1% of SMEs indicate that their employment will increase this year, 61.2% that they will maintain it and only a small 3.8% expect to decrease it. With respect to sales, the trend is similar, with 22.6% expecting to increase them this year, 73.4% to maintain them and only 4% expecting them to decrease. A nuance must be added to these favorable expectations in the case of sales and that is that they are less so than the reality of last year. In 2022, 33% of SMEs increased them compared to 22.6% who plan to do so this year.
These are the data from the 2023 Pyme Report, prepared by the General Council of Economists of Spain (CGE) and the Foundation for Strategic Analysis and Development of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (Faedpyme), which includes the results of a survey carried out among 799 Spanish SMEs.
The authors of the report highlight that where SMEs have problems to be competitive is in what they call external obstacles, and here they focus on four main ones, such as high energy costs and inflation, which the vast majority of SMEs (85%) describe as main problems, followed by the lack of qualified personnel (78%) and high interest rates (66%).
However, the report also highlights how a large number of SMEs do not need to resort to bank credit. Only 18% require it while the rest are self-financing or affirm that they do not need to resort to credit. What is also clear is that the larger the SME, the more it accesses this bank financing.
From this analysis of the situation of SMEs also comes a list of demands for the next government that leaves the polls this Sunday. They focus on less tax pressure, lower Social Security contributions and more aid for investments. On a scale from zero to five, reducing taxes stands at 4.4 very important, followed by aid for investment and the reduction of social security contributions. These are the elements that SMEs demand to gain competitiveness.
The report also makes it possible to establish a robot portrait of SMEs in Spain, in which the predominance of family businesses appears, which represents 68.4% of the total, with an average age of 29 years, a great majority managed by men, 83%, and with 70% of managers with higher education.
