The price to pay for the economy would be very high and the main cause, needless to say, would be the Coronavirus. 73,200 Italian companies are in danger of closing permanently: we are talking about businesses that have between 5 and 499 employees. A very hard blow that is equivalent to 15% of the total. Of these, almost 20 thousand are activities in the South (19.900) and 17,500 in Central Italy.
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These are the numbers that emerged from the Svimez survey – study center of the Guglielmo Tagliacarne-Unioncamere chambers of commerce which highlights how the companies most at risk are precisely those that “have great difficulty resisting the selection made by Covid as a result of structural fragility due to absence of innovation (of product, process, organization, marketing), of digitization and export, and of a forecast of negative economic performance in 2021 ».
Center-South in difficulty
The survey also identifies which companies are most at risk: an almost double share concerns activities related to services (17%), compared to manufacturing (9%). In general, it can be said that Italian companies are in great difficulty: almost half (48%) are fragile, in the sense that they sin in innovation, digitization and exports, with a gap that is always marked between the North-West and the North-East ( respectively 46% and 41%), Center (50%) and South (55%).
“After refreshments, help other companies”
Luca Bianchi, the director Svimez, also underscored the criticality of the situation: “The various sectoral impacts, combined with the particular fragility of some service sectors, require, after the first phase of refreshments for all, a new phase of specific safeguard interventions sectors in greater difficulty, accompanied by specific initiatives to increase the digitization, innovation and export capacity of companies in the Center-South ».