Many Irish firms and managers may be unprepared to cope in an economic downturn, an economist warned yesterday.
Speaking at the Sales Institute of Ireland conference, Mr Eoin Fahy, chief economist with KBC Asset Management, said companies in the US and Far East had recent experience of dealing with periodic downturns and had coped with the problems by paring back their sales expectations and cutting costs.
"By contrast, there's a whole generation of Irish business people that has grown up on a steady diet of robust demand, and their ability to steer a safe course through the coming months is by no means assured," he said.
His comments were echoed by Mr Phil Codd, country manager of Siebel Systems Ireland, who said tens of thousands of business people have entered the system since Ireland's currency crisis of 1991/92 who have no personal experience of how priorities change according to circumstances.
"My advice to sales professionals is not to set aggressive targets for the very near term, but instead to position themselves for what promises to be a very pronounced international recovery in the second half of next year, led by a significant upturn in the US economy," Mr Fahy said.
Ms Georgina Charleton, director of the Sales Institute of Ireland, said the extent of the economic downturn was being exaggerated by many economic commentators.
