Guarded optimism emerged on the corporate front last week with the first published reports of listed companies’ six-month results for 2016, which show a significant rise in net profits, with cumulative results showing an increase of 36 percent.
Turnover for listed companies still hovered at 24.3 billion euros, excluding EBITDA and refinery groups, which if the latter are included shows only a 3.9-percent increase from the same period in 2015.
In essence, the trend shows that listed companies are preserving resources amid a particularly negative economic landscape in the country, but at the same time appearing trapped in a zero-growth spiral that allows little leeway for future forecasts.
Looking closer at the figures, 44 percent of listed companies reported losses for the first half of the year, whereas 14 percent overturned previous loss-making periods to report a profit for H1 2016.
