Business confidence – how is it?

most positive of people. We thought that was likely to affect business confidence at the moment.

With extremely low unemployment, good GDP per capita, sunshine hours, the sea, skifields, mountain bike tracks and national parks on the doorstep, Marlborough is increasingly being seen as one of the very best regions to live and work in, across New Zealand.

Teaming up with MDC the Chamber recently helped to put together the We Love It Here campaign #weloveithere aimed at attracting skilled people to move to the region for work. Afterall that’s why so many of us have chosen to move to and to live in the region, because “We love it here.”

We’ve also been involved in putting together the Marlborough Business Insights Survey with Council, to look at how confidence is within the regional business community at the moment. The focus is on seeing how well businesses are going and what their level of confidence in the coming year is.

The messages we get in the media and from Economists about con fidence in NZ are almost entirely negative at the moment. Record levels of inflation, rising interest rates, a looming global recession, natural disasters and a cost of living crisis. It’s enough to concern even the

So, we asked our members and well over 200 businesses completed the survey, with the vast majority of the largest businesses completing the survey, we think it’s likely captured businesses generating over 70% of the GDP from right across the region and across all sectors, so it’s statistically valid.

But it’s the results that are the really interesting thing.

Over 50% of the businesses had a better year in 2022 than in 2021, then about 30% were about the same, with only 20% doing worse than the previous year.

When you then look at their forecast and how they think 2023 will be, you might expect a majority would think it would be worse than 2022, but it’s not.

Again over half the businesses think it will be better and only a fifth that it will be worse.

The wine industry and visitor economy sectors being the most positive not surprisingly, with a bumper harvest in 2022 and thought their business would get worse. So it looks like the constant barrage of bad news in the media has everyone worried for everyone else.

But when you ask them about their business only a small proportion see it going backwards. So the outlook is definitely tough NZ, but it looks better in the region and although we have some businesses who are definitely going through tough times, most are feeling positive about the coming year.

The biggest challenges they all faced weren’t surprising, with inflation and recruitment challenges being the major ones.

On the plus side there are rising revenues, international demand and increased productivity (in part due to cutting costs during covid).

In terms of employment 73% of businesses thought they would remain the same or increase their staff levels, so it doesn’t look like our low unemployment rate is going to rise any time soon.

Then looking at investment in their businesses 51% intended to invest further in their business, with most investing in plant & machinery, their staff (including training) and buildings.

So overall the pressures remain and are of concern, but the plus sides seem to outweigh those and give many businesses across the region reasons to be positive. Let’s hope they are right.