CEOs regain their confidence

This rising confidence has translated into a planned boost in recruitment, with nearly 40 per cent of CEOs expecting to increase their headcount this year. Contrasting with 25 per cent of CEOs planning job cuts over the next year, down from nearly half who decreased headcount in the past 12 months.  
In Asia Pacific and about half of CEOs are looking to increase employment in 2010, and this figure leaps to over 60 per cent in . Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of UK CEOs say they expect their headcount to rise by more than 8 per cent in 2010. Overall, the survey found that 81 per cent of CEOs worldwide are confident of their prospects for the next 12 months, while only 18 per cent said they remained pessimistic. The results compare with 64 per cent who said they were confident a year ago and 35 per cent who were pessimistic. Thirty-one per cent of CEOs said they were now "very confident" of their short term prospects, up 10 percentage points from last year, a low point in CEO confidence since PwC began its tracking. The survey results were released at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.  
The survey revealed striking differences in confidence levels -- and by extension the impact of the global recession -- among CEOs in emerging economies and those in developed nations. In North America and Western Europe , for example, about 80 per cent of CEOs said they were confident of growth in the next year. That compared with 91 per cent in Latin America and in China/Hong Kong, and 97 per cent in .  
Looking at the longer term, the results were more even. Overall, more than 90 per cent of CEOs expressed confidence in growth over the next three years. Those results, coming at the start of a new decade, were about on par with confidence levels of CEOs in PwC’s 2000 survey. But 10 years ago the economic split was very different, with 42 per cent of North American CEOs extremely optimistic – twice as many as in Asia .  
For the future, a total of 60 per cent of CEOs said they expect recovery in their national economies only in second half of 2010 or later, while 13 per cent said recovery was already underway, and 21 per cent said it would set in during the first half of this year. Return to growth was fastest in , where 67 per cent of CEOs said recovery had begun in 2009. However, nearly two-thirds of CEOs in the and more than 70 per cent in Western Europe said the turnaround would not begin until the half of 2010.  
"The fears of a global economic meltdown have receded and CEOs are more upbeat about their prospects," said Dennis M. Nally, Global Chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers. "CEO confidence is tempered, however, by the slow pace of recovery and the impact of often drastic cost-cutting and other steps taken to survive the downturn. The emerging economies are clearly recovering at a faster pace than those that are more developed. Companies with the best prospects for early recovery are those who managed through the recession while keeping an eye to the recovery ahead.”  
In turn, Vasile Iuga, Country Managing Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers , said: “It is the first time that CEO’s from companies operating in participated in the PwC Global CEO Survey, the most important tool for assessing the expectations of the business community worldwide. We are confident that in the next year’s edition of this global report, the participants from Romanian companies will be even more numerous and that the findings of the survey will reflect more accurately “the pulse” of the managers from Romania.”