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Interview
5 April 2020 2.00 h

Joan Canadell

President of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce

“We don’t want any firm to go under”

“We have to accept that stopping for a month is not the end of the world” “This crisis is affecting everyone, small, medium and large”

Speak­ing from con­fine­ment at home, Joan Canadell pri­ori­tises peo­ple over the econ­omy but also points out that many com­pa­nies will be hit hard by the dev­as­tat­ing ef­fects of the Covid-19 cri­sis. A sup­porter of a total lock­down, as the Chi­nese did with the city of Wuhan, the cham­ber pres­i­dent be­lieves that dras­ti­cally halt­ing busi­ness ac­tiv­ity will be com­pen­sated by ben­e­fits to pub­lic health.

We’ve never had a cri­sis like this.
Not our gen­er­a­tion. We’ve yet to see whether the ef­fects will be greater than those from the 2008 fi­nan­cial cri­sis. It’s a dif­fer­ent type of cri­sis: that one did not come about as sud­denly as this one, and it took a long time to come out of it. The Covid-19 cri­sis ap­peared out of nowhere and we hope it will also be over rel­a­tively quickly.
Were we pre­pared for it?
Not at all. Nei­ther from the point of view of health nor so­ci­ety in gen­eral, which tends to live day-to-day. But nor was the busi­ness sec­tor, which works on the basis of credit. We never imag­ined such a thing could hap­pen so sud­denly and so we weren’t ready for it.
Have the au­thor­i­ties re­sponded well?
That de­pends on where you are talk­ing about, but there has been a gen­eral fail­ing on the global scale. China went through this two months ago and no other coun­try seemed to take note. Here every­one has failed to some ex­tent. Hav­ing said that, if we com­pare the mea­sures taken by the state au­thor­i­ties, which have full pow­ers here, and those im­ple­mented by other coun­tries, it’s ob­vi­ous that from our point of view they aren’t doing very well. Or oth­ers are doing bet­ter. The Cata­lan gov­ern­ment has the pow­ers it has and what it can do is lim­ited, but in terms of the strat­egy we need to fol­low, we are all in agree­ment with pres­i­dent Torra’s call for a total lock­down of the coun­try and a halt to busi­ness ac­tiv­ity.
Other as­so­ci­a­tions don’t agree.
We de­bated the issue in the cham­ber and there were some who were in favour of only a par­tial lock­down, but in the end the over­all con­sen­sus was that it would be bet­ter to close things down com­pletely. We think that if we don’t stop every­thing we can, then the dis­ease will do it for us in a dis­or­gan­ised way over which we will have no con­trol. With­out plan­ning, with the dis­ease de­cid­ing who must stop and who can keep going, it makes every­thing more com­pli­cated. At the same time, we’re bas­ing our ar­gu­ment on the ex­pe­ri­ence of Chi­nese com­pa­nies in Wuhan, who have told us that until they stopped com­pletely the pan­demic did not stop. In Wuhan, just about every­thing came to a halt for two weeks, and after that ac­tiv­ity began again grad­u­ally. Over two or three months every­thing was car­ried out in a very co­or­di­nated man­ner. We have to ac­cept that stop­ping for a month is not the end of the world. Just about all com­pa­nies stop for a month of hol­i­days every year.
There are sec­tors that never stop.
It’s true, but the con­se­quences of not stop­ping for a month could mean that the prob­lem, which also af­fects the sup­ply chain, could be ex­tended for three months.
But there will be ex­cep­tions.
Yes, the health sec­tor and the en­tire food sec­tor chain. Even the com­pa­nies that make the ink for the pack­ag­ing of food prod­ucts. But per­haps just one shift in­stead of three will be enough. There will be some ex­cep­tions, but not many.
Does the cri­sis hit small com­pa­nies, the self-em­ployed and work­ers hard­est?
It’s a global prob­lem. The auto sec­tor has stopped al­most en­tirely. And fash­ion and tex­tiles. The cri­sis is af­fect­ing every­one, small, medium and large. Ob­vi­ously, the self-em­ployed per­son liv­ing on €2,000 a month can sud­denly be left with noth­ing. Large firms are bet­ter funded or have more ac­cess to credit. But I don’t think this cri­sis dis­crim­i­nates,
Is the help of­fered to SMEs and free­lancers suf­fi­cient?
No, not at all. From the first day we said that the im­por­tant thing is to have liq­uid­ity and, for the mo­ment, from the in­for­ma­tion we have, the banks are not giv­ing credit with­out lim­i­ta­tions, they want guar­an­tees and so it seems that the liq­uid­ity that com­pa­nies and SMEs need will not be enough. And it’s not only an issue of liq­uid­ity, as the sec­tors that have sus­tained losses need help. It’s not the same for sec­tors like tourism or restau­rants, which have com­pletely closed down, as for in­dus­trial sec­tors, which have con­tin­ued pro­duc­ing to some ex­tent.
Will mea­sures ’dur­ing’ and ’after’ be re­quired?
Some mea­sures will over­lap, dur­ing and after, but the most im­por­tant thing is a total lock­down for two or three weeks, and then a re­cov­ery pe­riod of two to three months. After that we’ll see which com­pa­nies can keep going and which can’t, and that’s what con­cerns us. What we want to avoid is any com­pany hav­ing to go into re­ceiver­ship be­cause of the Covid-19 cri­sis. We have to try and avoid any com­pany get­ting to this point, or as few of them as pos­si­ble. We pro­vide ex­pert ad­vice on our web­site, and on the first day alone we got en­quiries from 130 com­pa­nies, a score of which fear that the sit­u­a­tion could force them into re­ceiver­ship.
Do you have any idea how many com­pa­nies are in this sit­u­a­tion?
We still don’t know. But al­though the state of emer­gency does not allow some com­pa­nies to sub­mit a tem­po­rary re­dun­dancy plan be­cause they are not con­sid­ered to be in a sec­tor that is af­fected, they still have dif­fi­cul­ties op­er­at­ing, or they have no more or­ders, or they can’t pay all of the bills. Or they might even be com­pa­nies that, even lay­ing peo­ple off tem­porar­ily, still can’t go on for three or four months due to ex­penses like rent or mort­gage. There are thou­sands of such com­pa­nies in Cat­alo­nia. We’ll have to see how many of these firms can be saved, and our aim is for no com­pany to close down due to the coro­n­avirus.

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