Optimism rules the day

There are a lot of great nuggets of insight in PwC’s Global CEO Survey, which launched last week – and which everybody should check out. A few of the particularly interesting ones:

·??????The glass is about three-quarters full: Responding to the basic questions we ask, as to whether CEOs expect global economic growth to improve in the coming year, 77% agreed—that’s up from last year, and the highest reading on this measure since we started asking this question in 2012. The survey was in the field in October and November, before the Omicron wave hit. But it speaks to a fundamental optimism that the global economy is continuing to recover and rebound. For comparison’s sake, the IMF in October predicted the global economy would grow 5.9% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022.

·??????Do we live in an ESG bubble? Given the media attention, and the amount of time very large companies and investors spend talking about the need to make progress on climate, you might expect that CEOs are fully on-board and engaged on the topic across the board. But the survey finds some pretty significant cleavages. Big companies are far more likely than small ones to have made serious commitments. Nearly two-thirds of the companies with revenues of $25 billion or more have made net-zero commitments, while only 10% of companies with revenues of less than $100 million have done so. Public companies were more than twice as likely as private companies to have made net-zero commitments.

·??????Cyber risks predominate. Typically, we tend to hear CEOs talking about cyber risks in the wake of a ransomware episode or a data breach. But our survey shows that cyber is very much on the minds of the denizens of the c-suite. When asked to register their concern about global threats that could negatively impact their company over the coming 12 months, 49% of CEOs identified cyber risks. That was the single-most cited risk, barely edging out health risks (48%).

There’s much more. Check it all out here