Businesses are cautious about investments in 2025. A survey by Confindustria Emilia-Romagna has been presented.
28/07/2025
Emilia-Romagna businesses are leaning toward investment but are demonstrating greater caution for 2025. The threat of tariffs, energy costs, and bureaucracy are holding back investment.
Everyone's efforts, including the Region's, are needed to support economic growth. Bologna, July 17, 2025 -
The survey on investments by industrial companies in Emilia-Romagna, conducted by Confindustria Emilia-Romagna together with the region's Confindustria and Industrial Unions, confirms the proactivity of the regional production system, despite the uncertainty and critical issues characterizing the international economic scenario.
The Emilia-Romagna companies surveyed invested an average of 5.3 percent of their revenue in 2024, amounting to €871 million, and focused primarily on investments in tangible and digital assets.
Sixty-eight percent invested in plant and machinery, 61 percent in software and IT, and 51 percent in staff training, demonstrating their strategic focus on incremental innovation and operational efficiency.
The investment forecasts of the companies surveyed are more cautious for 2025, given the general context of uncertainty and growing geopolitical instability. 88.5 percent plan to invest in 2025, compared to 92 percent who invested last year.
The overall value of planned investments is down 1.7 percent. "The willingness of entrepreneurs to invest," stated Annalisa Sassi, President of Confindustria Emilia-Romagna, "is crucial to contributing to the regional economy's stability.
Today, businesses are penalized by energy costs among the highest in Europe and the potential increase in US tariffs, a real threat to regional industry, which has quadrupled its exports to the US since 2000. We are the second-largest region in Italy after Lombardy in terms of export value: the most exposed sectors are transportation, mechanical engineering, food, and non-metallic minerals.
The current volatility of US trade policies discourages the planning of medium- to long-term investments or projects in the US market and beyond. Businesses will need to diversify their outlet markets and reconvert production, but these are choices that require time, resources, and strategic vision.
Today, we must rebuild a climate of confidence and a perspective that will allow us to boost investment. In this context, the Region is called upon to support the production system with targeted internationalization policies and remove the many bureaucratic obstacles that hold businesses back, representing the primary constraint on industrial investment.
On this last issue, we have a huge amount of work to do in the country, and as Confindustria, we have made specific proposals to both the Government and the Region – and this has been the case for some time. Forty percent of companies invested in research and development in 2024, with marked differences between small, medium, and large companies. Small companies struggle to address the high risk and medium- to long-term time horizon typical of research and development projects, as well as sustain the financial burden, and are therefore more inclined to adopt existing technologies.
Medium and large companies have partially suspended or postponed their production and technology investment programs, pending the full implementation of the Transition 5.0 measure. The high level of regulatory complexity, interpretative uncertainties, and delays in implementing the measure have hindered access even for the most structured companies. More than one in four companies invested in digitalization in 2024, and the outlook for 2025 is for further growth.
Even in this area, the gap between small businesses (20%) and medium/large businesses (35%) is significant.
Furthermore, medium-sized and large companies are investing in their organization and business models (25%), much less so than small companies (10%).
Among the obstacles to investment, bureaucracy is the main constraint perceived by companies, cited by 37 percent. Following closely behind, with 35 percent of responses, are geopolitical uncertainty and weak expected demand, fueled by a climate of instability.
The difficulty in finding qualified human resources remains one of the greatest obstacles to growth, particularly for large companies, which have a more complex and specialized demand for skills. The mismatch between labor supply and demand is marked in technical, digital, and managerial skills, essential for managing the new technologies needed to address the challenges of innovation, digital transition, and sustainability.
Forty-three percent of large companies invest in environmental sustainability initiatives, compared to just 19% of small companies.
This gap reflects important structural factors: large companies have greater financial resources and technical expertise, operate more frequently in international markets where regulatory and reputational pressure is greater, and are subject to more stringent environmental regulatory obligations.
Small businesses, despite showing increasing interest, often struggle to translate this into concrete action due to financial, management, and information constraints.
This asymmetry risks exacerbating competitive imbalances, slowing the ecological transition of the productive fabric as a whole, and necessitates strengthening support for SMEs through targeted, simpler, and more accessible tools. Regarding financing sources, businesses primarily make investments through their own resources, which are used in 78% of cases. Secondly, they resort to bank credit, while the use of alternative sources such as public funding and venture capital remains marginal.
This poses potential challenges both in terms of the effectiveness of policy tools and in terms of accessibility, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. The presentation of the Investment Survey, which took place on July 17 in Bologna at the regional headquarters of Confindustria, was attended by Annalisa Sassi, President of Confindustria Emilia-Romagna, Alessandro Fontana, Director of the Confindustria Research Center, Alessandro Malavolti, CEO of AMA SpA, and Marco Perocchi, Head of Corporate Banking at Crédit Agricole Italia.
The Emilia-Romagna Industrial Investment Survey, now in its twenty-sixth edition, surveyed 382 companies with a turnover of €19 billion and over 48,000 employees. The sample reflects the region's industrial structure: 86% SMEs, three-quarters of which are manufacturing, with 58% of their turnover generated abroad.
Link in bio >https://www.confind.emr.it/news/cautela-delle-imprese-sugli-investimenti-nel-2025-presentata-lindagine-di-confindustria-emilia
