Keeping a lid on prices is high of thoughts for executives holding the purse strings as financial situations bitter.
Cost management emerged as the very best precedence of chief monetary officers surveyed by Deloitte Access Economics as margins are squeezed by excessive inflation.
With the labour market nonetheless extraordinarily aggressive, securing and retaining expertise remained a key threat for senior finance executives.
But going ahead, companies are unlikely to maintain bringing on employees on the identical price.
About one in 4 CFOs anticipate headcount to scale back, up from about one in 10 six months earlier.
Many companies nonetheless plan to rent, nonetheless, with 36 per cent anticipating to develop their ranks. But that’s nonetheless far beneath the half of all CFOs anticipating further headcount within the earlier survey.
Deloitte’s Stephen Gustafson mentioned discovering key expertise was nonetheless vital.
“The labour market remains tight which continues to create challenges for businesses who face a difficult trade-off between attracting and retaining talent and controlling cost growth,” he mentioned.
The survey additionally revealed rising pessimism among the many CFO group as the fact of Australia’s weak financial outlook sunk in.
Roughly half of the senior finance executives reported feeling optimistic about their firm’s monetary efficiency, down from 72 per cent six months in the past.
Around one in 5 at the moment are feeling pessimistic about their firm’s outlook.
Mr Gustafson mentioned the hole between financial pessimism and particular person business optimism was closing.
He mentioned CFOs gave the impression to be in two minds when surveyed six months in the past.
“Since then, the resilience in business confidence we saw at the end of 2022 has fallen away in response to the more challenging economic environment.”
Risk urge for food really grew a bit in comparison with six months earlier.
Still, solely 24 per cent mentioned now was a very good time to tackle threat.
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
