NSW Small Business Commission: Business Survey Wave 14 Report for May 2022.
The online survey was completed between 9 May 2022 – 18 May 2022 with 2,124 small and medium sized businesses across NSW responding.
Key differences where relevant between small and medium business responses are highlighted throughout the report.
Wave 14 results: • Confidence in NSW Economy: Small businesses’ confidence in the NSW economy has remained the same since last month, while for medium businesses it has slightly increased.
• Confidence in Future Business Prospects: Small businesses’ confidence in business prospects has increased slightly since last month, while for medium businesses it has declined, although not significantly.
• Predicted Future Revenue: Predicted future revenue results did not change significantly for small and medium businesses this month.
• Revenue in the Past 3 Months: Past-three-month revenue results for small and medium businesses improved slightly this month.
• Trading Status (Small Businesses): The trading status of small businesses (focussed on businesses actually trading) has remained high at 90%.
• Challenges to Business: The number of businesses stating ‘the impact of Coronavirus in general’ as a main challenge decreased significantly this month. The other most common challenges remained relatively similar.
• Strategies for Current Business Landscape: There were no significant changes in the top 5 strategies.
• Number of Staff: The average total number of staff for small businesses remained the same (4.0 average total number of employees), but still remains relatively lower than levels since the beginning of 2021. ‘Medium businesses’ total average number of employees decreased slightly (64.4 to 62.7).
• Worst Affected Industries: Two industries underperformed this month relative to other industries, these were: ‘Accommodation and Food Services’ and ‘Retail Trade’. These industries have lower scores for key measures of confidence and performance. ‘Accommodation and Food Services’ had the lowest confidence in their future business prospects with 50% of businesses in this industry saying they were fairly or extremely worried. Encouragingly, ‘Arts and Recreation Services’ were on par with other industries this month.
• Tourism-Based Businesses Still Underperforming: As seen in every month of research last year and this year, businesses in this classification (which span a number of industries) almost always had a significantly lower result for measures of confidence and performance. 50% of tourism-based businesses are fairly or extremely worried about their business prospects in the next 12 months, significantly more than non-tourism businesses (27%).
• Businesses Reliant on Visitors (and Foot Traffic) Still Underperforming: As seen in every previous month of research, those businesses that identified as usually relying/relied on visitors (local, interstate or international visitors)/rely on foot traffic had significantly lower confidence in the economy and their business prospects, and are significantly more likely to close down permanently given current circumstances when compared to those who don’t rely on visitors/foot traffic. Businesses that rely on international visitors were the least confident groups, with over half (54%) of these businesses being fairly/extremely worried about their future business prospects.
• Impact of COVID: There is some sense in the data that COVID – whilst still an issue – is becoming less of an issue:
• On the open-ended ‘main concerns’ soap-box question, mentions of COVID have dropped significantly
• And on a range of pre-coded questions, selections of COVID-specific attributes have declined in May – whereas broader issues such as cost of business inputs, cash flow, customer demand, access to staff have remained in line with April results.
