Small commerce exceeds growth expectations in Querétaro

Queretaro, Qro. Small commerce this year exceeded the annual growth projection that was set at 2% at the beginning of 2022, highlighted the president of the National Chamber of Small Commerce (Canacope), in QueretaroSergio Martinez de Leon.

At present, he added, this sector reports an economic growth that ranges between 2.5 and 2.7% per yearabove the predicted variation.

This behavior, he said, is largely related to the lifting of sanitary restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which allowed businesses to resume the capacity and hours prior to the virus.

After exceeding projections for this year, the leader of Canacope estimated may 2023 be a positive year in which the trend of growth and economic recovery continues.

We are very happy because we are going to achieve the growth that we had foreseen (…) we are between 2.5 and 2.7%, that encourages us to think that 2023 is going to be a very good year”, he stated.

Even though challenges are foreseen for the beginning of 2023, due to the impact of the January slope, the representative of the commerce sector predicted that this period will be less complex than the one experienced in the last three years, from 2020 to 2022, when they suffered even more the setbacks that the health contingency left them.

“Let’s remember that January is very complicated for us, very high inflation, the January slope, but we were able to cope with it, for us the most key thing, this year, was the 100% opening of the economy,” he said.

The final balance of the last quarter of 2022, he deepened, is positive, since for December alone, small businesses estimate an economic spill of 1,000 million pesos due to the December holidays, a figure that is almost 20% below the indicator prior to the pandemic.

“These 1,000 million pesos in December are going to help us a lot, we are 250 million below pre-pandemic levels, but we are already close to this level of normality and that makes us very happy, we can already foresee 2023 with inflation trending down. the drop because we are going to do much better ”, he estimated.

With the spill at the end of the year, it is expected that businesses will be able to strengthen their finances and face the effects of the next slope in January.

“Commerce is going to capitalize, it is going to be able to face the challenges of this January slope, we see commerce as strong, we see figures that encourage us, some businesses report normal behavior in their actions or in their pre-pandemic development and that We are very pleased,” he said.

By mid-2022, he specified, this sector had reached 80% of its pre-pandemic sales, however, this recovery had a stagnation in the third quarter; However, he added that it is estimated to reach between 90 and 95% of pre-pandemic sales during 2023. However, he specified that some businesses have managed to resume pre-pandemic sales, however, it is not the generality.