Every tenth company in Russia is afraid of shutting down

As RBC reports with reference to the monitoring data of the office of the business ombudsman Boris Titov, 33.1% of respondents from among the leaders or owners of companies noted a decrease in turnover compared to 2020. 27.1% - said that it remained at the level of the last year. Only 19.1% of those surveyed announced a gradual business recovery. And 9.7% of companies are preparing to close.

According to the results of the study, 66.8% of companies expect the state to reduce the tax burden or a new tax restructuring, and 46.8% ask simply not to close the business for quarantine.

Businessmen believe that the main difficulties this year are weak demand, the inability to pay property tax and pay rent, and the lack of funds for staff salaries.

At the same time, if in 2020 1.7% of companies launched their own bankruptcy process, then in 2021, 10.9% want to resort to this. This indicator could be affected by a moratorium on bankruptcy in relation to companies especially affected during the pandemic.

About 25% of the respondents said that they did not try to get support from the state during the crisis, and 31.8% were unable to use it. 36.7% of companies resorted to restructuring debts and deferring tax and credit payments - while almost half of them considered these measures insufficient. In addition, 30.7% of firms were unable to fulfill the conditions for retaining the number of employees due to a drop in turnover - and therefore did not receive a soft loan at 2% per annum.

The survey was conducted by Titov's apparatuses at the beginning of February 2021, with the participation of managers and owners of 5,000 companies from all regions of Russia.