The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) they still have not recovered from the losses they suffered from the pandemic, added to this is the political uncertainty and conflicts that also affect them. Ana María Choquehuanca hopes that public purchases will help them.
How are SMEs currently?
No leader is going to tell you that we are fine. (…) We are dealing with a post-pandemic issue that we have not yet come out of, we have not finished. Not only is there the political, social, and economic situation that has occurred during the administration of Mr. (Pedro) Castillo, not only because of the external context due to the consequences of the war, but we also have to deal with this upheaval that the country is experiencing today.
Do you envision a change with this new cabinet?
Having reached the time we are in, the generation of trust has been lost, this is the social capital that any country has, so SMEs practically do not believe in anyone. (…) We have been willing to listen to the president (Dina Boluarte), to give her our proposals and tell her what the problem of each sector is. She knows everything we are going through. The action has come immediately because she has arranged with the ministers who can, through a transversal axis of the portfolio with which they work, initiate the solution to the problem. (…) They know that our problem lies in two points, one is the lack of a market and what has caused the closure of companies: that producers have informal workers. The other is financing, how do we reactivate ourselves. With Reactiva there was a possibility, unfortunately they did not put a lock. (…) 50% cannot return loans, cannot return anything.
What is that 50% equal to?
There are more or less 535,000 companies that could no longer be reactivated, that were lost, that closed, migrated, went bankrupt.
What has the Executive responded to them? What are the first steps to be taken?
The first step is the public purchase. The largest buyer in Peru is the State. I believe that there we can, at least, solve the problem of those that are still formal and what we want to do is strengthen small businesses that are still in the formal sector and can continue to grow or stay where they are. On the sidelines, as Pyme Peru we are also trying to consolidate our private purchasing program with Confiep.
What is the growth projection?
We had talked about three points, others said 2.8 points, but the situation has changed, so we are going to see what the result is because we are just starting January.
