Survey finds Irish chief financial officers 'cautiously optimistic'

SOME 78 per cent of chief financial officers (CFOs) at Irish companies believe the economy will not significantly recover until 2011, up from 69 per cent, according to the latest quarterly survey of CFOs by accountancy firm Deloitte.

The survey, which seeks to establish the views of CFOs on financial markets, economic outlooks and business trends, found that companies were seeing signs that the economy was beginning to stabilise.

Some 52 per cent the CFOs surveyed for the fourth quarter of 2009 do not expect their company to recover until 2011, compared with 38 per cent in the previous quarterly survey.

The vast majority of those surveyed (85 per cent) supported the measures taken by the Government in December’s budget to tackle the public finance deficit. However, only 7 per cent believe they were the correct measures to take to address public sector efficiency.

An increasing number of CFOs were optimistic about the financial prospects of their own companies in the final three months of the year, with 58 per cent saying they were optimistic, compared with 38 per cent in the third quarter.

The majority of CFOs expect their revenue and profit to improve or at least stabilise over the next six months.

“Cautiously optimistic would be an accurate way to describe how CFOs in Ireland are currently feeling,” said Shane Mohan, a partner at Deloitte.

“They appear to have acclimatised to the business operating environment and, having dealt with the most urgent challenges such as cost-reduction and working capital management, they now see some light at the end of the tunnel.”

A quarter of CFOs said the availability and cost of credit from the domestic banks would never return to boom-time levels, while 42 per cent said it would be at least 2012 before there was a significant improvement in the availability of credit from the banks.

CFOs believe that the exchange rate between the euro and the dollar is stabilising, but opinion was divided over the euro-sterling rate.

The survey, which was conducted at listed firms, large private companies and Irish subsidiaries of multinationals over the last two months, is the second in a series of quarterly surveys.