The Regional SME 2022 Report, produced by Confindustria and Cerved, in collaboration with UniCredit and Gruppo 24 Ore, analyses the trends and prospects of the 160,000 Italian companies that - employing between 10 and 249 people and with a turnover of between EUR 2 and 50 million - fall within the European definition of small and medium-sized enterprises, and generate a total added value of EUR 204 billion. The study takes into account the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the persistence of price increases in the raw materials market and analyses the exposure of Italian SMEs to climate, environmental and transition risks in the different regions.

The spread of the pandemic has interrupted the slow recovery of Italian SMEs saw their turnover drop by 8.6% in 2020. The varying intensity of the impacts of the pandemic reflects the profound heterogeneity of our productive fabric and the different exposures of local economies.

In 2021, estimates of the economic accounts of small and medium-sized enterprises show the first signs of recovery, which are also certified by the overall resilience of financial stability indicators. Based on the estimates, the turnover of Italian SMEs is expected to grow by 8.1% year-on-year. However, the increase in revenue, although significant, was not enough to close the gap from the pre-Covid period (-1.2% compared to 2019 levels). On the gross profitability, much sharper growth is expected in 2021, with year-on-year margins increasing by 17.5% and exceeding the levels recorded in 2019 (+4.7%). Driving the strong recovery in margins are, on the one hand, the excellent performance in terms of added value growth recorded mainly in construction and industry and, on the other, the dynamics of containment of personnel and service costs following the recessionary phase. The South is the area in which the best performance in value added is observed compared to pre-Covid levels (+8.4% compared to 2019), followed by the North-East (+7.3%), while the Centre is in contrast, which continues to remain below 2019 levels (-4.6%).

According to forecasts, the recovery process of Italian SMEs may slow down in the next two years. In the 'base' scenario, pre-Covid levels will be recovered in all areas as early as 2022, despite a year-on-year deceleration of the revenue growth rate (+2.4% in 2022 and +2.0% in 2023). At the end of the forecast period, the area that will grow the most compared to pre-Covid levels is the South (+3.8%), while the North-West will show the smallest rebound (+2.4%).

In the scenario "worst"Instead, the dynamics of recovery of SME revenues could come to a sharp halt, as a result of low growth in 2022 (+0.6%) and a contraction in 2023 (-0.5%), which would push away the recovery of the values lost during the pandemic (-1.5% compared to 2019). The Centre would return to being the area of the Peninsula most affected (-1.9%), mainly due to the marked contraction observed in Tuscany (-3.0%), but strong repercussions would also be recorded in the North-West (-1.8%), slowed down by the performance negative in Piedmont (-2.2%). In the North-East (-1.3%), and especially in the South (-0.8%), the impact of the new economic situation would be more mitigated, null or almost nil in Friuli Venezia-Giulia (0.0%), Molise (0.0%) and Campania (-0.1%), which show the best resilience.

Based on the EU Taxonomy and a range of additional information, Cerved has defined a score which measures the degree of exposure of Italian companies to the transition process.

At the overall level, SMEs operating in sectors with a high or very high transition risk number slightly more than 16,000 (10.6% of the total), employ 478,000 workers (11.0%) and have an exposure to the credit system of more than 44 billion (17.1%). The data on the territorial incidence of activities at risk of transition reflect the different productive specialisation of local economies. Southern Italy is the geographical area most exposed to the transition risk, with about 127,000 employees involved (14.7%), followed by the Centre (10.9%) and the North-East (10.1%), while the North-West is the area with the lowest incidences (9.6%).

Crossing the analysed dimensions, 45,781 SMEs present at least one risk (29.8% of the total)with a financial debt volume of EUR 87.7 billion (33.7%). The area with the highest incidence of SMEs with at least one risk is Central Italy (36.8%)where there is substantial exposure in all three dimensions, followed by the North-East (34.2%), penalised by the high physical risk associated with the climate change. In the South, where credit and transition risk are prevalent, 29.4% of SMEs present at least one risk, while the North-West is the area with the lowest overall incidence (22.7%).

At a time like the present, which is characterised by great uncertainty about future economic scenarios and in which the effects of two years of very deep crisis are still evident, the structural limitations of our SMEs appear more evident than ever and risk the resilience of the system in the face of the new criticalities generated by recent war events and the crisis in the supply of raw materials, especially energy. Structural and cyclical criticalities define a framework in which it is necessary to act with diversified but equally effective interventions, and above all dedicated to supporting the competitiveness of businesses, the real engine for the country's recovery.

More specifically, some of the interventions included in the Budget Law 2022 may be critical for companies. For example, the non-renewal of the statutory moratorium for SMEs, coupled with some shortcomings in terms of public guarantees, may prove to be a major critical issue for economic operators. There is still a lack of structured intervention for the capitalisation and strengthening of the financial structure of companies, on which the tax measures envisaged so far (ACE, DTA credit and aggregations) are still weak.

It is therefore necessary to create better conditions and more effective instruments to strengthen the financial structure and capitalisation of companies and boost their investments, to accompany companies on a path of growth and innovation that also involves human capital, strengthening training and retraining to adapt skills to the strong acceleration in the use of new technologies, particularly digital.

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