Foreign Exchange availability has been ranked the top impediment to doing business in PNG. This is the finding from the 2024 Papua New Guinea 100 Chief Executive Officers Survey.
The results for the survey were officially announced yesterday during a special business breakfast event at the Stanley Hotel in Port Moresby where a detailed analysis was provided by Westpac’s Senior Economist Justin Smirk.
The event also marked the launch of the 2024 edition of the Business Advantage PNG Annual publication, in which the survey is published.
The survey since 2012 has asked for the profit, investment, and recruitment expectations from Papua New Guinea’s largest companies and asked them to rank the impediments they face.
The respondents rated foreign exchange availability as the top impediment. Among them, security or law and order issues, unreliable utilities, lack of government capacity, shortage of expertise or skills and regulatory uncertainty.
Other impediments include; inflation, unreliable telecommunications, corruption, logistics, work permits and visas, supply chain constraints and high employment costs, lack of market research and intelligence, high real estate rental costs, competition, access to overseas markets, lack of available office/warehouse, access to capital, and lack of available land.
Westpac Senior Economist, Justin Smirk explained that while business confidence is largely sustained in this year’s PNG 100 CEO survey, there are rising concerns about several business impediments.
“While profits in 2023 fell short of expectations for PNG’s leading companies, CEOs are nevertheless expecting profits to improve in 2024. Meanwhile, recruitment and investment expectations for this year have held onto most of their 2023 improvement.
“This year’s survey was conducted from November 2023 to January 2024, with most CEOs surveyed before the 10 January civil unrest in Port Moresby. Despite that, 88 per cent of CEOs said security/law and order issues were either mission-critical or very important to them (up from 65 per cent last year). It is not unreasonable to think firms would be even more concerned if the survey was re-run after January.
“Concerns about inflation lifted to the highest level in the history of the survey, suggesting inflation is a significant issue,” Smirk analyses in the 2024 edition of the Business Advantage PNG.