Morocco’s Businesses Face Severe Economic Strain Amid COVID-19 Crisis

According to Amine Diouri, Director of Studies and Communication at Inforisk and head of the Inforisk Dun Trade program, for a good number of companies, managing this crisis period is complicated. Referring to the World Bank’s analysis, the specialist announces that the economic crisis linked to Covid-19, in 2020, will be worse than the 2008 financial crisis, which was marked by a 0.6% decline in global growth. According to him, international investors have already disengaged from emerging countries, for an amount of around $80 billion.

This year, the Moroccan Center for Economic Conjuncture (CMC) forecasts a growth of 0.8% for Morocco. The country has gone in a few weeks from a supply crisis (difficulty in supplying Moroccan companies from China) to a demand crisis, where the consumption of many sectors of activity is heavily impacted by confinement: tourism, hotels, restaurants, non-food businesses...

For the Director of Studies and Communication, Morocco’s main trading partners (France, Spain) are in a critical health situation, and it will take many more months before a return to normal. As for SMEs, they are currently facing both a drastic drop in activity due to lack of demand and cash flow problems.

According to the specialist, the exit scenarios from the crisis are rather pessimistic in the short term. In the medium and long term. For now, we will have to learn the lessons of this crisis, in terms of anticipation (of hospital needs in particular). "From an economic point of view, the solidarity that we are now invoking in the event of a crisis should be permanent. We could have avoided having weakened SMEs at the start of the crisis if the large clients, especially private ones, had played the game in terms of payment terms," he concluded.