Pessimistic analysis of small and medium-sized companies, which employ some 9 million employees in Spain, by the country’s main sector organization, Cepyme. The confederation chaired by Gerardo Cuerva has warned this Monday that the financing that SMEs currently have to deal with has multiplied by four in a year and that is causing them to access fewer loans.
“The sharp rise in interest rates multiplies the financial effort of SMEs, in a context of scarcer bank loans, which results in a restriction on commercial credit,” highlights the document corresponding to the situation in the second quarter of the year.
Although the number of SMEs had a year-on-year increase between April and June of 0.4%, the rise in interest rates and inflation are causing worrying signs in the most modest productive fabric, warns Cepyme. A clear consequence of the ECB’s economic policy is the increase in the cost of loans. Thus, the average interest rate on new bank loans for these companies has gone from 1.62% a year ago to 4.45%. A heavy burden when it comes to accessing financing.
This situation has caused SMEs to obtain less financing than before the pandemic; a quarter less, specifically. The volume of new bank loans was equivalent to 20.3% of SME sales in the four-year period 2016-2019, compared to 15.3% in the second quarter of this year.
Cepyme, which monitors day-to-day business activities through different indicators, concludes that “the situation of Spanish SMEs is declining in year-on-year terms after six quarters of increases.” It is true that sales of SMEs have grown by 0.9% year-on-year. However, productivity and rising costs continue to hamper improvement, laments the business organization.
“The average productivity of SMEs has accumulated two quarters of falls and is 9.6% lower than in 2009, as a consequence of the special difficulty of Spanish companies in gaining size,” explains Cepyme. In addition, labor costs have recorded eight consecutive quarters of increases of more than 5%, and the increase shoots up to 12.6% in small companies. Cuerva has been repeatedly asking to stop “the persistent increases in social contributions.”
Cepyme, specifically, calls on the current Government to contain the policies of increasing labor costs, which hamper the growth and productivity of SMEs and which have been catapulted by continuous increases in social contributions over the last five years and the increase in the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI)”.
The business organization estimates the increase in the minimum contribution bases at 50% since 2018 and the maximum at 18.5%.
