80% of CFOs Expect Revenue, Profit Declines Due to COVID-19
By Jacqueline LaPointe, Revenue Cycle Intelligence
April 1, 2020
More CFOs anticipate COVID-19 to have a negative impact on revenue and profits as they realize the effects of the outbreak will not dissipate quickly.
CFOs of healthcare organizations and other major companies are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the impact COVID-19 will have on their bottom lines, according to a new survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
About 80 percent of CFOs and other finance leaders expect COVID-19 to decrease revenue and/or profits this year, the survey of finance leaders in US and Mexico found. The 55 respondents of the March 23 survey included CFOs and finance leaders in healthcare, as well as Fortune 1000 companies, non-profit associations, and privately held companies.
Only 58 percent of finance leaders in PwC’s March 11 survey said the outbreak would harm revenue and profits, researchers pointed out.
The latest survey also found that more respondents do not expect their businesses to back bounce quickly after the worst of the pandemic is over. In the survey, only 76 percent of respondents said they expect their business to go back to normal within three months if COVID-19 were to end immediately. That was down from 90 percent two weeks ago.
“The realization that the effects of COVID-19 aren’t going away quickly is settling in,” the authors of the survey report stated.
Most companies (87 percent) now believe COVID-19 will have a significant impact on business operations, and it is causing finance leaders a great concern, the survey found. That is up from 54 percent in the previous survey.