COVID-19: Country Report – Spain & Portugal
By Sergio Reyes, Partner - IAF Consulting
April 6, 2020 Despite the overall situation, we are still fully covering Spain and Portugal regions. In this regard, and through our existing business network, we are in touch with all relevant players, including corporations, multipliers and official agencies. Today’s technology allows us to organize on a regular basis several videoconferences in order to review all relevant matters with key decision makers in different economic sectors. Furthermore, our cloud technology infrastructure provides us with the ability to have 24/7 all access to our database resources. Since March 15th, Spain's and Portugal's governments have decided that all citizens should remain at home. This decision has evolved since March 30th to a complete economic shut down (except for those sectors with are highly relevant for the society such as: health, food industry, defense, telecom, ...) which has just been extended until April 25th. In terms of economic aid, the government has put in place a 200 billion euro plan in order to help companies and individuals. It is expected that additional supporting schemes will be introduced in order to facilitate the re-start of the economic activity and in order to avoid a massive increase in the unemployment rate. In order to be more specific, the economic support scheme will be based on seven issues such as:
Helping companies and individuals with their existing debts by refinancing those at lower interest rates and at longer terms
Extending term for basic payments on essential services such as: electric supply, watering, gas energy,…
A social bond specially addressed to help those families which are severely affected by unemployment rates
Allowing city town halls to increase their budgets in order to allow them to enhance their social programs towards their local citizens
Facilitating companies to put in place temporarily firing schemes in order to release the financial pressure while corporations are unable to operate
Allowing affected employees that are not working any more to access easily to their social benefit earnings
Huge governmental impulse towards teleworking by providing state financial aid to all those companies that will move their economic activity to a secure and virtual environment.
Finally, we do believe that both Spain and Portugal have the capacity to overcome the existing economic situation and during the second semester of 2020, both countries will be in the process of recovering from this dramatic pandemic situation.
April 6, 2020 Despite the overall situation, we are still fully covering Spain and Portugal regions. In this regard, and through our existing business network, we are in touch with all relevant players, including corporations, multipliers and official agencies. Today’s technology allows us to organize on a regular basis several videoconferences in order to review all relevant matters with key decision makers in different economic sectors. Furthermore, our cloud technology infrastructure provides us with the ability to have 24/7 all access to our database resources. Since March 15th, Spain's and Portugal's governments have decided that all citizens should remain at home. This decision has evolved since March 30th to a complete economic shut down (except for those sectors with are highly relevant for the society such as: health, food industry, defense, telecom, ...) which has just been extended until April 25th. In terms of economic aid, the government has put in place a 200 billion euro plan in order to help companies and individuals. It is expected that additional supporting schemes will be introduced in order to facilitate the re-start of the economic activity and in order to avoid a massive increase in the unemployment rate. In order to be more specific, the economic support scheme will be based on seven issues such as:
Sergio Reyes
