Longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on SMEs: follow-up research in Sichuan Province, China

ABSTRACT

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are continuing to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic as it moves into its third year. The ‘dynamic COVID-zero’ policy adopted in China from August 2021 to the end of 2022 has inevitably put pressure on local SMEs, which makes the situation in Chinese SMEs not only different from the situation during the initial outbreak, but also unique in the world. In July 2022, an online follow-up questionnaire was conducted on SMEs in Sichuan Province to assess their performances, pressures, and requirements in this particular period of time and compare the results with our findings from 2020 to reveal the longer-term impacts of COVID-19. It was found that: (1) most SMEs had poorer revenue and profit performances; (2) while the pressure of increasing production cost and declining market demand has increased significantly, normal productions and operations are no longer as strongly disturbed; (3) SMEs require more financial support but less operating and employment subsidies; (4) and the SMEs’ overall confidence has recovered and the willingness to invest is rising. The situation in different sectors was also analysed and compared, with the results revealing problems within the tertiary industrial sector (wholesale and retail businesses).

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• SMEs
• longer-term impacts
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors express sincere gratitude to the responsible editor and reviewers for providing professional and valuable comments, as well as to all enterprises who responded to our questionnaire survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2022-02-19-many-european-countries-relax-epidemic-prevention--who-officials-worry-about-unblocking-too-soon.SyeQvfpCk9.html

2 The dynamic COVID-zero strategy is to follow the premise of "external prevention of import, internal prevention of rebound" prevention and control strategy, when the emergence of local COVID-19 cases, to take effective comprehensive prevention and control measures, and to "find one, extinguish one", to quickly cut off the chain of epidemic transmission, so that each epidemic is terminated in a timely manner achieving maximum effectiveness with minimum cost(Liu et al., 2022).

3 https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

4 The speech of President Xi Jinping on the meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on March 17th, 2022

5 Static management is a pandemic prevention and control measure which has not been clarified but used by officials to mean that:(1)All staff in administrative institutions, except for those involved in pandemic prevention, should work at home;(2)All enterprises, except for those guaranteeing the livelihood of residents and the basic operation of the city, should suspend operations;(3)All merchants, except for qualified supermarkets, pharmacies, medical institutions, etc., should suspend operations;(4) Residents should stay at home and avoid gathering.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 22&ZD142]; Social Science Foundation of Chengdu: [Grant Number 2022CS112]; Sichuan Province Science and Technology Support Program: [Grant Number 2023JDR0171].