SMEs – smaller sales due to crisis

‘Over 90 per cent of the interviewed companies have answered that they have registered smaller sales this year. Of those, 27 per cent said that their sales dropped by up to 20 per cent, 53 per cent said that their sales dropped by 21-50 per cent, and 20 per cent said that their sales dropped by over 50 per cent.

This is a national-level problem considering that 98 per cent of the companies in Romania are SMEs,' Aurel Saramet, the President of FNGCIMM, stated yesterday in a press conference. Other problems identified by the respondents consisted of excessive taxation and large interest rates (16 per cent of the respondents), the drop in orders (14 per cent of respondents), bureaucracy (8 per cent of respondents) and financial gridlock (5 per cent of respondents).

In what concerns the measures that the companies took in order to alleviate the impact of the economic crisis, most of the companies (namely 36 per cent) have cut their administrative expenditures, 19 per cent have lowered the number of employees, 15 per cent have slowed down their activity, and 14 per cent have cut their marketing and advertising budgets. Only 9 per cent have cut their employees' wages. The companies are asking the Government for tax deductions for investments (24 per cent of the respondents), for hiring the unemployed or the young (17 per cent) and for developing industrial parks (11 per cent).

The companies are also asking for credits with subsidized interest rates (21 per cent of respondents). ‘When establishing the 2010 budget we have to take into account the tax problems and the measures seeking to back the growth of demand. We have to adopt a flexible fiscal policy that would adapt itself to the new economic demands. We have to stimulate the setting up of new companies, the growth of demand and to stimulate the companies from a fiscal point of view by introducing tax deductions for the reinvested profit in the case of investors in technology,' Constantin Nita, the Minister for SMEs, Commerce and Business Environment, stated yesterday during the press conference.