The Quagmire of Corporate Failures
If business creation is doing well, boosted among other things by the programs put in place by the government, failures do continue, nonetheless. In the first half of the year, 5,646 companies went bankrupt, up 10.3% compared to the first half of 2021. The pace especially accelerated in the second quarter of the year under the effect of the repercussions of the Russian war waged in Ukraine. In this situation marked by the lack of visibility, the good news comes from the pace of growth in business creations. This progression of creations is stronger than that of failures. The ecosystem renewal indicator, which measures creations versus failures, stands at 5.9. In other words, when a company goes bankrupt, six are created, according to the Inforisk study on bankruptcies in the first half of the year. The challenge for these new enterprises is to manage to stay alive and get through the first five years of operations, a period during which new enterprises rarely generate profits and need cash to finance themselves and find markets. Moreover, the median age of companies that have filed for bankruptcy is 4.8 years for a share capital of 100,000 Dirhams (10,000 USDs). It is above all small businesses that have not managed to stay alive: they represent 99.9% of all companies that went bankrupt in the first half of the year, versus 0.5% for SMEs while large companies were not affected. The economic situation remains difficult for companies that have been unable to leave the zones of turbulence for more than 2 years. Moreover, as of last March, two support measures were put in place by the government to deal with the war in Ukraine.
The first measure relates to the guarantee ceilings under the classic Tamwilcom offering, which have been raised in order to increase the potential for the supply of cash loans. The second measure concerns the rescheduling of the “Oxygen” and “Relance (Stimulus)” loans for a period of up to three years. The expected goal is to strengthen support for the financing of the operating cycle, and the reactivation of business investment. A month later, a circular from the Head of Government in favor of the construction sector was signed, again with the aim of reducing the economic impact of the crisis on contractors who had been awarded public supply and works contracts, as well as on procurements related to works contracts. Even with these provisions, businesses, especially small ones, remain in a delicate situation. “Macroeconomic factors are added to other structural factors, in particular the payment periods which continue to lengthen considerably, and contribute to the lasting weakening of a large part of our businesses, in particular the VSMEs which are the most fragile”, underlines Amine Diouri, Director in charge of Studies and Communication at Inforisk. For him, “with the increase envisaged this year (+14%), insolvencies in Morocco will have experienced an average annual growth of 34% since 2020. I think that with these figures, we are a bit drifting away from normalcy”.
Today, the tragedy is mainly observed in the retail sector, followed by real estate and construction, and, to a lesser extent, in the transport and manufacturing industries.
Khadija MASMOUDI
