Survey reveals that almost all CEOs are concerned about labour shortage

The availability of key skills is a challenge according to 95 percent of CEOs in Hungary, consulting company PwC said on Thursday.

Among challenges, changing workforce demographics was mentioned by 76 percent and higher employee benefits by 73 percent of CEOs, according to the PwC survey conducted late in 2017.

“The percentage of CEOs saying they would like to increase their staff numbers has been over 50 percent for years now,” said Anita Mekler, tax partner at PwC Hungary.

Fully 89 percent of CEOs are confident that their company’s revenue will grow in the next 12 months, 55 percent predicted the Hungarian economy will keep growing and 47 percent said that the global economy would expand.

The outlook for CEOs’ own companies and Hungary has not changed, while their opinion of the global economy improved from a year ago.

Nearly half of Hungarian CEOs picked Germany as their most important foreign market, followed by Romania, the United States and Slovakia.

“For Hungarian companies, Germany has traditionally been the most important target for market growth. Romania now ranks as the second most important country with regard to Hungarian companies’ local growth prospects. In addition to geographical proximity, the key drivers here are easier networking among the Hungarian minority, and a market twice the size of the Hungarian market,” said economist László Urbán.

PwC interviewed the CEOs of 165 Hungarian companies between October and December 2017. The survey was conducted in cooperation with national business association MGYOSZ.

Source: MTI