Arrearage in the economy continues to deepen as a result of the lack of cash and of restrictive lending terms, with more and more companies finding themselves issuing payment instruments with insufficient funds.
In July, banks had more than 46,700 cases when they did not find enough money in the companies' accounts to pay the cheques or promissory notes they issued, one thousand more than in the previous month, NBR data reveal. The number is almost double compared with July 2008.
The amounts of bounced payments witnessed a 3.5% decline compared with June, but are more than 2.5 times higher than in the corresponding period of last year. Analysts, however, say that both the amounts and the number of bounced payments are important indicators, and the fact that one of them worsened compared with the previous month reveals a negative trend across the entire segment.
"The ideal thing would have been to see both the number of transactions and their value go down," says Lucian Anghel, BCR's chief economist. Laurian Lungu, managing partner of Macroanalitica, says that "both indicators are important, and the increase in the number of payment incidents indicates that a wider range of economic operators from various sectors is affected by the crisis."
The causes that prevent companies from making their payments are diverse and include the lending decline and delay in payments for their invoices, analysts explain.
"It is mainly about the destruction of the cash flow. Companies are more careful about cash flow management and are making the decisions they believe to be the best, postponing one payment for another," Lungu says.
Many companies are faced with bad payers among their customers and have already taken precautious, by demanding more guarantees even though this means losing some of their clients.
"Things are not alarming, but we can see that the number of payment incidents involving debit instruments has doubled compared with last year. This is why we made the decision not to supply merchandise unless it is safe to do so and require letters of guarantee from banks or other types of mortgages," says Alin Giurea, chairman of Pambac Bacau, one of the biggest players in the milling and bakery industry. "Our turnover is down 10%, but we got paid for everything we sold," he adds.
On the other hand, the state plays a part in this arrearage, too, because companies have significant amounts to collect from the Government, even if considering VAT repayments only, which are delayed by as much as six months. Still, the state has tried to make some improvements in this regard and the Finance Ministry has recently launched an online application that lets companies check to see when the state pays.
Analysts, however, expect the situation of payments with debit instruments to remain difficult, following the trend of the overall economy.
"I believe it is too soon to draw a conclusion, we only need to take into account the fact that the summer is not a key period. We should wait two or three more months to be able to make out a trend," Laurian Lungu says.
"We reached a certain bottom of the crisis, but that does not mean we will bounce back right away, we might remain at this level for a longer period of time," he added.
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