Backing your Ambition
The Azets Barometer provides insight into the current and future business climate through the perspective of ambitious businesses and their owners across the markets we serve.
Working in partnership with Meridian West, an independent research agency, we speak to hundreds of business leaders to analyse trends relating to economic outlook, financial performance, and emerging threats and opportunities.
Explore the dashboard
The results of the latest Azets Barometer are available to view now on our interactive dashboard. Explore the dashboard below where you can filter the report by turnover, number of employees, and region.
The dashboard is best viewed on a desktop browser.
Overall key findings
- Cautious Optimism Prevails: Respondents continue to be cautiously optimistic about the future economic outlook and sentiment remains corelated with business size and revenue. Smaller businesses, perhaps constrained by resources and expertise, remain more pessimistic compared to their larger, better resourced counterparts.
- Stable Financial Performance: The latest data on business financial performance ratings shows no significant change from the previous edition of the survey, remaining slightly above the average optimism score. Larger businesses are surer of their finances than smaller ones, reflecting the trend on economic outlook.
- Strategic Growth Focused Mindset: Overall, the sentiment among businesses continues to reflect a proactive stance on adapting to modern business imperatives, including digital transformation, cyber resilience, and sustainability. At the same time, businesses maintain a realistic perspective on external economic influences and fiscal prudence, with scores remaining virtually unchanged from the previous survey, indicating a stable and consistent outlook amidst ongoing challenges.
- Business Concerns Ease Across the Board: The latest survey scores reveal a business landscape where concerns have decreased across various dimensions compared to the previous survey. Geopolitical uncertainty remains the most pressing issue, though with a lower score. This suggests that while businesses are navigating a complex global environment, their apprehension has somewhat eased.
- Succession Planning Remains a Blind Spot: A stark divide remains between larger and smaller businesses in areas of succession planning, with larger entities exhibiting more structured approaches. In particular, it is a strategic weakness for businesses in Finland.
- Cybersecurity incidents on the rise: An increasing proportion of company’s report experiencing cybersecurity incidents in the last 12 months. However, the majority still report no events. This could indicate a lack of awareness rather than an absence of incidents. It is not clear therefore whether these results indicate increased events or growing awareness.
- Cashflow: Businesses primarily rely on 10-12 month or longer cashflow forecasts, with larger enterprises typically adopting more extended forecasting horizons compared to smaller companies.
- Businesses are future-proofing: Respondents overall report a prioritisation of investments digitalisation, cybersecurity, and employee retention, with large firms emphasising digital transformation while micro businesses strike a balance between growth and security.
- Talent Acquisition Confidence Gap: Businesses express greater confidence in retaining top talent compared to attracting it, with larger enterprises displaying higher levels of confidence in both attraction and retention than smaller companies.
- Talent Management Trials: Compensation, competition, and skills shortages pose significant challenges for businesses' talent managers, with the intensity of these challenges varying based on company size. Medium-sized firms appear to struggle the most with talent-related issues compared to their smaller and larger counterparts.