Company payments, Italia loses positions in European ranking

If the health of the entrepreneurial system is also measured by the ability of companies to pay on time, we can say that the health of Italian companies is not worsening but neither is it improving. There is in fact a deterioration, but it is slight enough to say that the system is holding up. If, however, we look across borders, the analysis changes. According to the latest data emerging from the Cribis Payment Study (the Crif Group company specialising in providing information and advice to businesses), in 2025 the percentage of companies that pay on time (within 30 days) will drop by 1.7 percentage points compared to 2024, while the number of companies with serious delays (over 90 days) will decrease by 0.3 percentage points. As if to say that the virtuous ones worsen, but not by much, and the less virtuous ones improve, but by very little. It is, however, in the comparison with Europe that the data gains significance and here the gap opens up, because the report - more than 2 billion payment experiences collected through the Cribis iTrade network in 37 countries around the world representing more than 90% of GDP - depicts an increasingly clear division.

So, in Italia the percentage of companies that pay on time is 43.4 per cent (down precisely 1.7 percentage points compared to 2024), while the percentage of companies with serious delays is 4.1 per cent (-0.3 per cent). With this result, Italia ranks respectively 20th and 28th in the European and world rankings of the most virtuous nations, slipping a few places compared to last year when we were respectively 16th and 24th.

Leading the way in Europe are the Northern countries: leading the ranking (as last year) is, in fact, Denmark with 94.9% payment on time. This is followed by Poland (86.6%), the Netherlands (74.7%) and Switzerland (68.5%). Significant is the case of Luxembourg, which makes an important leap over the previous year, rising from 41.5 per cent in 2024 to 54.8 per cent. Belgium also shows signs of improvement, rising 9.2 per cent to 47.3 per cent. For analysts, 'the country benefits from automatic wage indexation mechanisms to inflation, a rare tool in Europe that protects the real income of companies and can reduce liquidity pressures along the payment chain'.

In contrast, Ireland's trend is the opposite: the country suffers the sharpest drop in the area with a -12.8 per cent to 45.5 per cent. This drop can be 'explained by the "double binary" of the Irish economy: aggregate GDP, driven by pharmaceutical and tech multinationals, does not necessarily translate into greater liquidity for local SMEs, which are exposed to high operating costs and persistent tensions in the property market'.

The panorama of the rest of Europe is more articulated and fragmented. Hungary (75.8 per cent) and Slovenia (53.3 per cent) lead the pack, while the rest of the area is at much lower levels: France 46.5 per cent, Turkey 46.4 per cent, Spain 45.9 per cent and Italia 43.4 per cent.