Townsville Business Confidence Strengthens

The PVW Partners Quarterly Townsville Business Confidence Index indicates that business confidence has strengthened slightly in the December 2018 quarter, seeing 2018 finish with more positive business sentiment than that which it started.

Partner Carl Valentine said the overall confidence of the Townsville business participants moved upwards by just under 1 index point.

“There has been a distinct upwards trend in business confidence over the past couple of years when compared to the negative scores we saw between 2014-2016,” Mr Valentine said.

“With so many major infrastructure projects underway across the Townsville region, I would expect the upward trend will continue over the next 12 months.

“84 per cent of respondents to the PVW Partners Quarterly Townsville Business Confidence Survey believe the Port of Townsville Channel Widening Project is going to play an important role in the economic recovery of Townsville and none of those surveyed thought the project was not important to the future of the region,” Mr Valentine said.

Larger business respondents with a turn over more than $10 million tended to be more positive than their smaller business counterparts, with larger businesses responding more positively across almost all components of the index.

While the respondents that identified as benefiting from the mining sector indicated slightly stronger employment opportunities, their non-mining counterparts indicated relatively higher expectations on investing for future growth in terms of higher spending on staff training and capital expenditure.

“These results were a little surprising given the generally positive sentiment around the recovery of, and future prospects for, our mining sector. However, this bodes well for other sectors of our economy if they can invest wisely and prepare for future growth opportunities,” Mr Valentine said.

“Ideally, the best outcome for sustained higher levels of confidence would be a stabilisation of the market locally leading to more stable growth opportunities for businesses across our regional economy

“While business confidence can be fragile, the results we’ve seen over the past couple years are similar to those seen during the course of 2003-2004 when the longer-term trends are compared.

“The results from the last couple of years have been more volatile than those seen in 2003-2004, but optimistically the emerging conditions could see a return to longer periods of sustained business confidence in our region in the coming years.”

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