China’s small and medium-sized firms saw their income plunge nearly 70% in March from a year earlier, with firms in the hospitality and education sectors struggling the most to recover from the coronavirus, a study released on Tuesday showed, reported the South China Morning Post.
The results paint a bleak picture of the state of the world’s second biggest economy, which was hammered by the pandemic in the first two months of the year and is all but certain to record a first quarter contraction.
Revenues for small, medium-sized and micro firms at the end of last month were 69.5% below the same period a year earlier, according to the study by Tsinghua University’s PBC School of Finance.
The Tsinghua study was based on an analysis of business records from about a million companies whose combined operating revenues were equivalent to 12.9% of China’s national gross domestic product in 2019. Nearly two thirds had annual revenues of less than RMB 1 million ($142,000).
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