EuroFinance, the cash and treasury management research, conferences and training, today announced findings from its Europe-wide business confidence survey which reveals that Europe’s largest corporations expect difficult market conditions to extend for the next 12 months.
EuroFinance surveyed over 350 Finance Directors and Treasury Executives from the largest multinational corporations in Europe. The findings, collated between April and July 2008, provide the most comprehensive evaluation of opinions on current and expected market conditions.
“As these results demonstrate, Europe’s largest corporations believe that the credit crunch will last well into next year,” says Tom Leander, editorial director, EuroFinance. “However, the good news is that at the same time, corporate confidence is buoyant among 65.7% of respondents who expect M&A activity to increase with current market conditions offering interesting acquisition opportunities.”
“Based on face-to-face and telephone interviews with companies in the past four months, we believe that the pessimism is mainly related to the banking industry and to certain sectors where the credit crunch has impacted consumer confidence, i.e. sectors reliant on consumer spending/buying trends.”
“Our in-depth research shows that many sectors are still relatively confident. Many companies took the opportunity to refinance when rates were low and before the credit crunch really impacted. Higher rated companies are not reporting difficulty with financing and many still have large cash piles to tap into for growth opportunities.”