The growth potential of Italian SMEs is going to increase

Rome, 13 June 2019 - SMEs are the engine for the growth of the Italian business. This is, in brief, the opinion of Alessandro Dragonetti, Head of Tax at Grant Thornton in Italy, who participated in the award “Industria Felix - il Lazio che compete” and spoke on the presentation of the research carried out by Industria Felix Magazine in collaboration with Cerved research department, which took place at Luiss university in Rome to award the best and most performing enterprises in the Lazio region.

According to the results of the research, 84.9% of small, medium and large enterprises in Lazio generated profits in FY 2017. “These data – commented Alessandro Dragonetti – is in line with the growing trend of businesses in the Italian market (revenues increased by 5.3% while added value increased by 4.5%) although the reference macroeconomic landscape is still unfavourable to growth, at both domestic and international level”.

“But if we look at the trend of Italian enterprises, we can see that the strategic nature of SMEs is particularly interesting: in fact, they show higher growth rates compared to larger businesses, despite a decrease in the number of their operators. There are mainly four growth drivers in the middle market - continued Dragonetti - which is estimated at 4.7% in the period 2017-2022 and higher by 0.9% compared to large companies: technology, research & development, and innovation”.

“These four drivers are a strong growth potential for Italian SMEs and allow them to compete with large companies, at domestic but also at a global level, by having access to larger foreign markets to provide their products and services”.