According to EcoWeek, a weekly publication of the independent Think-Tank “TEMA”, the Tunisian Agency for the Promotion of Industry and Innovation (APII) has identified the closure of no less than 433 industrial companies in Tunisia since September 2019.
Among these companies, this hemorrhage concerns 212 “totally exporting”, i.e. half of the closures affecting what was once one of the jewels of Tunisian industry, textiles, which constituted the bulk of the fabric of SMEs in entire regions of the country.
Thus during the past year, this trend has accelerated, more precisely between September 2021 and September 2022: 121 industrial companies closed permanently. Among them, 44 companies are totally exporting, 24 were in partnership with Italy and 9 with Germany.
The same source reports that most of these bankruptcies were recorded in the northeastern region, with the textile and clothing sectors being the most affected, losing 138 companies. In total, 6,000 people lost their jobs there.
For the opponent and former presidential candidate of 2019, Lotfi Mraihi, who spoke on this subject yesterday October 31, “foreign investors will not return, and there will be no new ones as long as the political climate, fiscal and economic will dissuade them”.
Persistent consequences of the Covid, but not only
1 year ago to the day, in November 2021, Béchir Boujdai, member of the Executive Bureau of UTICA (the country’s main employers’ federation) alerted the public to the fact that the situation of most private companies in Tunisia was considered precarious and required “a real Marshall plan”. 54,000 companies were then threatened with closure, while 130,000 SMEs had already gone out of business.
Where are we today with a post-Russian-Ukrainian war world context that has been added to the pre-existing crisis? For the President of the Organization of Entrepreneurs, Yassine Gouia, ” the turnover of Tunisian SMEs has globally decreased by 70% as a result of this global and national context, which has caused their situation to fall back to the same level of the peak of the pandemic”.
Gouia explains that this shortfall for SMEs is now due to the lack of raw materials, galloping inflation in the world but also in Tunisia (9.1% in September 2022), the depreciation of the Tunisian dinar against the US dollar, but also to the deterioration of consumer purchasing power. “134,000 companies have closed their doors by declaring bankruptcy, and 250,000 others are unable to pay salaries and charges,” he said.
As SMEs are the sole vector of economic recovery, the Tunisian Central Bank (BCT) should, according to Gouia, put pressure on banks to grant cash facilities to SMEs that are struggling to access financing for their activities.
