The war in Ukraine, despite breaking out a year and a half ago, remains a significant factor not only for humanitarian reasons, but also for economic ones. Obviously, the initial shock at the end of February, in March and April 2022 was the most important for the economy – after all, Ukraine is an exporter of agricultural raw materials and certain metals.
Russia was also an exporter of many energy, agricultural, and metal raw materials. Therefore, on the global market, this led to instability and a significant increase in the prices of many raw materials, components, and also limited their availability. But since then, at the end of 2022, there has been some calming down. Companies that were dependent on contractors from Russia or Ukraine found other directions to supplement missing goods, components, parts – which consequently lessened the price increase pressure. However, we can still expect an increase in the price of raw materials – not only energy-related, but also agricultural – which can translate into food prices. And although European countries are energy-secured – it is not known what the energy and gas consumption will be in the winter months. So, the pressure for another price increase might appear.
“Poland appears to be relatively well prepared over the past months in terms of raw material availability. However, let’s remember that not only the war in Ukraine, but also the pandemic – meaning quite challenging previous years – have resulted in worsening economic conditions and the weakening of the microeconomic side,” said Grzegorz Sielewicz, the main economist of COFACE in the Central and Eastern Europe region to the eNewsroom.pl service.
“We see that many businesses are suspending their operations, but also unfortunately declaring insolvency. Insolvency is understood quite broadly here – meaning both typical business bankruptcy to liquidate assets, but also restructuring processes. All these activities share a common denominator – the lack of payment for the contractor. Our latest reports indicate that unfortunately, the number of business bankruptcies in Poland is rapidly increasing. During the pandemic, we had many supportive actions – now businesses react with some delay to the difficult economic situation. Many of them cannot carry out effective business operations, or even survive on the market. Unfortunately, our forecasts are quite pessimistic – the number of business bankruptcies will increase in the coming quarters, or even years,” analyzes Sielewicz.
