Accra, July 15, GNA - Business executives are optimistic that the next six months would be good for the operations of their companies, an Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) survey has revealed. About 70 per cent of the 276 company executives, who took part in the survey, held the view that although business performance was worse in the last six months, there is hope that it would pick up for the rest of the year.

The AGI Business Barometer, which replaces the annual Business Climate Survey, captures the prevailing business mood and expectations of Chief Executive Officers quarterly.

Internationally acclaimed methods are applied to produce quality forecasts of the short-term economic development.

Presenting the findings, Mr Tony Oteng-Gyasi, President of the AGI, said executives from micro to big companies across the agriculture, manufacturing, services and other sectors gave their ratings on how they saw the performance of their businesses in the last six months and what their expectations were for the remaining six months. There were also questions about the three most important challenges and any other problems that they faced in running their operations. Mr Oteng-Gyasi said review of the data indicated that companies in the services sector were hit more than those in agriculture and manufacturing.

Results indicate that between 60 and 70 per cent of manufacturing firms across sectors are hoping for better performance in the last six months of the year but some big companies are still sceptical hinging their recovery on improvement in the global economy situation. Sixty-one per cent of the executives cited the depreciation of the cedi as a major challenge confronting their businesses, especially as most of them relied on imported raw materials for production. Inflation, cost of credit and access to credit are the other ranked problems being faced by the companies.

Mr Oteng-Gyasi said cost of credit had been a persistent problem and there was the need to work out new solutions so that companies could borrow at lesser cost to expand their operations. He said efforts should also be made to arrest the depreciation of the cedi and stem inflation to make business planning more predictable. 15 July 09