According to Creditreform, German small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) were severely affected by the current economic crisis. All sectors felt the repercussions of the global recession on their sales and profit figures. Particularly affected were businesses from the raw material processing industry, construction industry, the metal processing and electronic industry. Furthermore, financing conditions remained dissatisfactory despite the lowering of interest rates by the European Central Bank. Some element of stability was registered in the fields of retail sale trade and in some parts of the service sector only. All in all, the economic indicator by Creditreform continued its downward trend and lost 2.5 points.
As a consequence, the risk for German businesses of becoming insolvent further increased in the first quarter 2009. The respective risk indicator by Creditreform (CRI) which is a crucial measure for assessing risk, increased by 0.04 points on the previous quarter. Currently there are 226 companies per each 10,000 businesses which have problems such as default in payment or which even filed for insolvency.
Over the first quarter in 2009 already overdue invoices were settled after a period of 13.4 days. In the previous quarter companies had paid overdue invoices after 12.9 days. The average creditworthiness of businesses was downgraded by one point.
Therefore, the prospects for the months to come remain rather pessimistic. In view of the current economic and financial crisis companies having a pessimistic opinion about the future continue outnumbering those with a more optimistic view. The respective index describing future expectations by companies, however, remained virtually unchanged at -10.3 points (previous quarter: -10.9 points).
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