Securing external funding has become the least-important problem for SMEs in the euro area, according to a new poll from the European Central Bank (ECB).
Just 10% of almost 12,000 enterprises quizzed for the ECB’s latest report in its Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE) series said that attracting finance was their primary concern.
Meanwhile, a dominant 27% said that their biggest issue was finding new customers and clients to work for. That was followed by worries over:
In particular, the majority of SMEs in Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands reported falling needs in net terms for external investment, amid a climate of strong finance from internal sources.
Some 16% of SMEs across the region reported increases in turnover, with just 1% of firms saying their needs for bank loans had increased, and 6% saying they required greater use of overdrafts.
However, there were national variations – and perhaps expectedly, SMEs in Greece were more concerned about securing loans than those of any other country.
The ECB’s poll – the 14th in its SAFE series – covered the period from October 2015 to the end of March this year. For the first time since the series began, it found that micro firms were not being left out in the cold, and had also benefited from an improvement in the availability of external finance.
An improvement in access to trade credit was reported across all business sizes, with leasing, hire purchase and equity similarly buoyant. Debt securities, though, had generally proven harder to come by.
Focusing on the euro area’s larger countries, SMEs in Germany and Spain saw particularly significant improvements in the availability of bank loans and overdrafts – while in Italy, the percentage of SMEs that signalled an increase in loan availability doubled on the previous survey.
Among the larger nations, only France registered problems with securing trade credit.
By stark contrast to the overall picture, Greek SMEs record an ongoing deterioration in loan availability – continuing the tone of their responses to previous SAFE surveys conducted amid the economic problems that have affected Greece.
They also reported difficulties in accessing trade credit, although the proportion of SMEs with that complaint halved compared with the previous round.