Half of Hungaryʼs CEOs optimistic about 2017, survey says

“We have started analyzing the data collected through the Hungarian CEO Survey. This year more CEOs took part in our survey than ever before,” says Nick Kós, PwC Hungary’s country managing partner. “The percentage of respondents who are confident that their company’s revenues will grow has once again surpassed the global average. Half of the Hungarian CEOs surveyed are very optimistic about their growth prospects for the next 12 months, compared to 38% of their global counterparts,” he adds.

The global survey, which will be published for the 20th time in its entirety in March, also gauges how CEOs think about the future of human and machine collaboration, how they are addressing challenges posed by the receding human factor, and how they are sustaining stakeholder trust in the digital age – all of which are key to long-term business success, hints Kós.

According to data released so far, although CEOs around the world feel they have plenty to worry about in the year ahead, their confidence in their own growth prospects and their outlook for the global economy are back on the rise.

Globally, some 38% (2016: 35%) of the CEOs involved in this year’s survey are very confident about their company’s growth prospects in the next 12 months while 29% (2016:27%) believe global economic growth will pick up in 2017, according to data released at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

While business leaders are more positive in their outlook, their levels of concern about economic uncertainty (82%), over-regulation (80%), and availability of key skills (77%) remain very high. Worries about protectionism are also growing, with 59% of CEO concerned overall, rising to 64% when you look just at CEOs in the United States and Mexico, the press statement added.

Despite a positive tendency on the benefits of globalization in building the free movement of capital, goods, and people, CEOs still seem to question whether globalization has done anything to close the gap between rich and poor, or mitigated the issue of climate change, according to PwC. This is in contrast to the first PwC CEO survey in 1998 when CEOs were positive about the drivers of globalization, the press statement noted.