More than 3,000 kilometers of distance between Kiev y Barcelona have not prevented effects of the russian invasion are needed in the business tissue. The luz four times more expensive inflation at record levels, the transport through the clouds and many raw Materials skyrocketing price for shortage. To the storm that unleashed the covid it only lacked a war in eastern Europe. And, a year later, SMEs are still noticing it: some for the better, most for the worse.
Manel Llaràs, baker: “I sell like never before, but I don’t deliver at the end of the month”
When Manel Llaràs spoke to EL PERIÓDICO in March 2022, a few days after he Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he was doing numbers to see if he had to fire one of his workers or not to balance the balance sheets. To this baker the gas bills and flour had been shot with the conflict in the East and he saw no other option to get around the red numbers. “In the end I had to do it, I couldn’t pay all the costs,” he admits.
His family has been dedicated to the center of Lleida to one of the oldest trades in humanity and currently runs two bakeries and a staff of 10 employees. When Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border costs had doubled. Today they are three times higher than before the war.
Llaràs has managed to plug the possible customer draintempted by the ssupermarkets and their worst but cheapest bread. And that has not been left other than to raise prices, 12%, in two batches, during the previous year. A figure below the average, taking into account that bread has become more expensive by 13.5% in the last year, according to the CPI data for January.
“At the moment I try to hold out without raising prices again. I know that this year I will have to do it again, another 6%, but I don’t even know when, I am assessing the best moment so as not to harm customers”, she affirms.
20 years ago Llaràs went from fuel their ovens with firewoodas had been done all his life in his family, at the gas. Cleaner and more practical, but today at the center of the price spiral. “We have been a year of financial agony important. With accumulated wear… I’m happy because ‘only’ I pay electricity 200% more expensive than last year. No more. But there is no way for prices to go down!”, he complains.
Consumption has held up and the economic catastrophe that more than one predicted for this year has not yet occurred. Consumption is holding up for now and Llaràs says that he has hired another person to replace the one he had to fire. “This Christmas we have sold a lot, like never before, but then you do the math and they don’t come out. At the end of the month I had to ask to defer some payments ”, he explains. “I don’t have a good feeling for this 2023,” he adds.
Susanna Visauta, industrialist: “Expectations are good, total uncertainty”
Optimism or pessimism among companies in the face of the persistent price crisis go by neighborhood. In the same way that he baker Llaràs did not show good feelings for this year, the director of administration of Suinsa, Susanna Visauta, it is said “excited”. “We have good prospects, we had several projects under development that we have already started to manufacture and there are markets that we had stopped during the pandemic and that they have been reactivated”, explains this industrialist, specialized in the mechanical manufacturing of high value-added parts.
However, he acknowledges that the buzz that comes from partners and clients “is not good” and that he is facing the year with “prudence”. His company, an SME with 35 employees – when she worked for EL PERIÓDICO last year there were 30 – is highly dependent on steelimported from Ukraine, and energy, with prices still skyrocketing. Visata says that last year he managed to maintain a fixed contract for electricity throughout the year, which allowed him, despite the increase, to be certain of how much he would pay per kilowatt. Today he has not been able to renew it under the same conditions and every month he checks the meter to find out how much his bills amount to. “When you call for an order, they give you a price when you ask and another when you call back to order it. the one of transport The price cannot be guaranteed until the same day the truck leaves. I live in total uncertainty, ”she says.
Despite this fog, Suinsa’s activity is on the rise. Now they begin to manufacture for Boeing parts for aircraft landing gear, a sector that was stopped during the covid and is now taking off again. Added to this are new medical device orders for ophthalmology o blister packs for a well-known pharmaceutical multinational. “I am excited, but I am also prudent. Labor costs have risen a lot with the renewal of the metal agreement. And I know that I depend on more people, that if things don’t go well for them they can ruin my forecasts. I am not ruling anything out for this year, ”she says.
Robert Cot, merchant: “The war has influenced as an excuse: if we wanted to, it would not affect us at all”
Barely 11 years of experience, and in a matter of days, when its neighbor closes, it will become the third oldest establishment in the main shopping street in the El Clot neighborhood, in Barcelona. “Something is wrong”, says the self-employed person in question, Robert Cotowner of colmado Natives. Of course, in this long decade, the last 3 years have been one of absolute storm: the pandemic -which benefited from the fact that it was a food store- combined with the war in Ukraine it has ended up becoming an unprecedented increase in costs. “I was from May to November paying more than 1,300 euros for electricity per month, when my usual cost was about 300 euros and my historical maximum had been 700 euros,” recalls this small businessman, who has also seen the price rise price of the product that arrives.
And that your business is based on sale of food that comes yes or yes from Catalonia, as a limit of what he understands by the product of km0. In other words, a priori, he would not have had to notice a price increase derived from the increase in the cost of long-distance transportation or the deficit of depending on which products when cutting off the tap Russia and Ukraine. And yet, so it has been. “We are a very rich country but we depend a lot on exports, that sets a market price, and those here have jumped on the bandwagon”, analyzes Cot. “It has metastasized from a small cancer and now we are all in the wheel of ‘if you charge 1 euro, I’ll charge 20 cents more’”, he assures.
“The war has influenced, yes, but as an excuse, if we really wanted to, it wouldn’t affect us at all,” launches Cot, who even with this condition of proximity has been buying more expensive for months.
The consequence has been see their margins very reducedbecause he has tried to raise the price just enough, and transform the cfull time contract of his only employee in one at half time. “Anyone who has a bit of a mattress can bear it, anyone who doesn’t, impossible,” says Cot. “Costs are very high and the free market is not so free,” he laments, in a reading in which there is no silver lining: “This will not change when VAT returns, and neither will it when the war in Ukraine ends” .
Leandro Izquierdo, restaurateur: “I am full every day and I have been losing money for three years”
The pandemic it was a ‘shock’ for tourism and restaurants, one of the sectors most affected by the coronavirus crisis by having to close its establishments tightly. This is the case of the anEl restaurant, run by Leandro Izquierdo, located near the Puerta de Alcalá in Madrid and a destination for regular customers of the surrounding companies and tourists who visit the city. “I’m full every day and I’ve been losing money for three years,” Izquierdo told EL PERIÓDICO.
The businessman has a date set in his mind: July 2021. Anel used to pay an electricity bill of 1,600 euros per month, which from that date became 3,500 euros y in August 2021 it shot up to 5,000 euros. “The bill has more than tripled. Electricity has always been a high expense for us, but more than 5,000 euros for a restaurant is outrageous, ”she explains. “Before the war started, all prices had already gone up a lot. But many providers were holding out so as not to pass on the increase to their customers, thinking that it would be something temporary, but months have passed and there has been no solution, ”he adds.
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Among the products that have had the greatest increase in costs, Izquierdo lists oil, sugar, milk and, above all, vegetables. “I am paying the vegetable supplier practically the same as the fish and meatwhen before it was practically half”, explains Izquierdo, who rules out that the increase for this product was 10% or 20%, but that “the price has doubled”.
And with costs going up, the only consequence he could have considered was raising prices. “If I cut staff, I don’t give good service; If I don’t give good service, customers stop coming. I can’t cut back on quality either because if I cut back on quality, customers will see that the restaurant has changed, which means we’ll also lose customers. The only way to stabilize and maintain ourselves is by raising prices because we cannot squeeze suppliers either. We are aware that they have adjusted and tightened a lot for many months without raising prices when everything was going up for them ”, he explains.