Great opportunities do not always come as the easy path or option, the one that is taken without consideration, many times that savior angel comes disguised as a demon, the difficult thing is to find him.
A golden opportunity?
Faced with these highly complex scenarios, there is constant talk that inflation can be a golden opportunity for companies. It helps them outline strategies, test their resilience and put their anti-risk plans in motion. At the end of the day, the Japanese word for “crisis” means both “danger” and “opportunity”; as such, everything will depend on the approach given to a situation as problematic as that of high inflationary pressures.
And what for some is a golden opportunity, for other companies it may well be the final blow. Especially for small and medium-sized Mexican companies (SMEs) that do not have the same capacity to respond to a crisis. Wow, they don’t even have access to the same financial instruments as larger companies to keep their inventories alive and manage them in the face of slow sales and mid-term stagnation.
Not everyone is in the same boat
Very early in the pandemic, it was often said that “we are all in the same boat” in the face of the health emergency. The metaphor was very incomplete. Rather, we were all in the same storm, but some navigated it with warships and others with fishing boats. The opportunities, that is to say, do not present themselves the same for everyone, much less for those who can barely survive.
SMEs face an extremely complex scenario thanks to inflation, but which is also chained to two years of pandemic, from which many companies barely came out ahead with great efforts. According to information from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), in Mexico approximately 30% of companies closed their curtains forever in the first months of the pandemic. Most of them, of course, were SMEs.
Limited room for maneuver
During COVID-19, SMEs survived with limited room to manoeuvre. They digitized dropper and as they could. The vast majority cannot do much more in a 2022 that becomes increasingly difficult for entrepreneurs. The peak sales season is just around the corner—like Buen Fin and the Christmas holidays—but a good proportion of the barely surviving businesses may not make it.