European SMEs Still Struggling To Get Finance
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across the European Union (EU) are still struggling to secure the financing they need, according to a survey carried out by the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB).
The joint EU-ECB Access to Finance survey spoke to 15,000 SMEs across 37 countries about their access to finance in 2013.
A third of firms said they had been unable to secure the full financing they were looking for this year and 15 per cent said access to finance was a significant business problem.
Other headline figures from the survey include:
- seven per cent of SMEs were discouraged from making a loan application because they assumed it would be rejected
- micro companies employing fewer than 10 people and SMEs in business for less than two years were most likely to be denied a bank loan
- 85 per cent of loans in the past two years were provided by banks
- only five per cent of SMEs used equity finance from April to September 2013
- 40 per cent of SMEs in Cyprus saw access to finance as their most pressing problem, compared with just eight per cent in Germany.
Antonio Tajani, the EC’s vice-president, said that since the financial crisis of 2008, “evidence has consistently shown that SMEs face large and disproportionate obstacles to accessing the finance they need to survive and thrive.”
