According to a recent study published by the Mastercard Economics Institute called Recovery Insights: Small Business Reset, during the pandemic, after indefinite closures, the number of small and large companies that were digitized in Latin America for the first time exceeded 200% in 2020, which reflects a greater demand for an online sales channel, but that speaks to us also of resilience and strategic alliances in complex and challenging environments.
Only in Mexico, the document points out, 31% of small companies that closed during the pandemic remained closed after six months, 3.6 times more than large companies. This is consistent with projections and trends in the rest of the world, where businesses and companies that closed early in the pandemic were three times more likely to remain closed in the long term than larger companies.
However, the mutual support and solidarity characteristic of the productive ecosystem in Latin America, demonstrated that the resilience of its actors -businesses and consumers- could sustain businesses, promote entrepreneurship and open new commercialization channels, through digitization, triggering a pace of learning, adoption and implementation of innovative high-tech financial solutions.
In this sense, support for local businesses was also accompanied by mutual recognition between users, customers, suppliers, brand designers, workers and other actors in the production and business chain, as part of the same ecosystem that should be involved and stand up to challenges, even at different levels, dimensions, and technical, financial, interest or degree of difficulty.
Generation of QR codes for transactions, implementation of biometric registration, authentication and access tools for shielding, as well as a complete range of touchless and cashless tools have stimulated more and better businesses, reducing previously recurring eventualities around physical presence, time pressure or the presence of cash.
Globally, a third more small and medium-sized industries (SMEs) were created in 2020 compared to 2019, almost eight times the number of large companies created, a trend that in Latin America resulted in new SMEs. Only in Brazil they grew 35% in 2020 compared to 2019, while in Mexico the increase was 13% in 2020 as opposed to 2019.
For its part, the strategic drive of financial leaders such as Mastercard is also paradigmatic, which has committed to incorporating 50 million small businesses and 25 million women entrepreneurs into the digital economy by 2025. Only in Latin America has it introduced a series of initiatives including the launch of Mastercard Digital Partners, a coalition focused on accelerating the digitization of small businesses across the region.
Faced with a diverse and challenging financial environment, but also full of opportunities and a voyant compendium of increasingly better designed, modern, secure and easy-to-use digital financial solutions, businesses have a much more convenient and accurate horizon than ever before, in where digitization and strategic allies are part of the same growth step for companies, regardless of their line of business, size or problem.
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