Confident, but immobile SMEs. Anthilia: 'Silent desertification risk'
Excellera research: 89% of Italian companies look to the future with optimism, but 83% struggle to calculate the return on investment. Chairman Landi: 'With 50% of companies close to the generational handover, the risk is the loss of decision-making centres to foreign capital'.
Confident in their own future, but in difficulty when it comes to planning investments for the dimensional leap needed to compete globally or simply to manage the inevitable managerial transition. A contradictory, if not paradoxical, picture in many respects is the one that the Osservatorio Pmi e Finanza (Observatory on SMEs and Finance) drawn up by Excellera and presented in Milan by Anthilia Capital Partners paints for Italian SMEs. The true productive fabric of our country appears robust overall and enjoys good health, but struggles at the same time to undergo the necessary transformation and runs the serious risk of handing itself over to foreign capital and thus impoverishing the country system.
Research data
89% of the sample selected for the survey (100 companies with an annual turnover of between 20 and 250 million euros) declared themselves confident about growth prospects for the next twelve months, and 55% expect significant investments over the next two to three years, although only two out of ten can be considered 'significant'. The problem, in this case, relates not only to uncertainty about the macroeconomic environment (indicated in 47% of cases), understandable given that the survey was carried out in the last month, or to bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles (30%), but also to the widespread complexity involved in assessing the actual return on investment. In fact, 83% of companies consider this task to be 'difficult' and 13% even 'very difficult'.
The node of the generational transition
The main consequence is that the majority of expenditure is allocated to the 'maintenance' of the company, e.g. modernisation of facilities (33%) or basic digitalisation (34%), while truly 'transformative' investments remain marginal. Only 14% of them are in fact aimed at company acquisitions or shareholdings, while just 10% are aimed at strengthening governance and the ownership structure. On this point, the actions of Italian SMEs appear to be particularly lacking, especially if we take into account the fact that the Excellera research shows that company management is an important issue for 46% of those interviewed, while the issue of the generational handover is considered the main challenge in 47% of cases.
The "desertification risk"
Inertia in turn brings with it a systemic risk, because if it is true that 'Italia is the third largest country in the world in terms of trade surplus', as Marco Fortis, Vice-President of the Fondazione Edison, pointed out during the event at which the research was presented, 'today the companies that produce this value appear more attackable than they seem,' admitted Giovanni Landi, President of Anthilia Capital Partners. The combination of a governance often tailor-made for the founder and the fragmentation of capital therefore expose the production system to the risk of being taken over by international capital: a particularly dangerous phenomenon that Landi defines as a 'silent form of industrial desertification'.
