The health crisis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated business investment in digital more than in the ecological transition. This is what emerges from a report published by the Banque de France.
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A direct consequence of teleworking and the tasks carried out remotely imposed by the various confinements: the digital transition has overtaken the energy transition. Companies that needed to modernize their production tools and manufacturing processes.
According to this study by the Business Financing Observatory, which depends on the French Central Bank, 26% of SMEs report an acceleration in digital spending. The phenomenon is more marked among medium-sized companies (ETI) with 60% of companies in this segment declaring that they invest massively in digital technology.
It should be noted that this progression was made with lower expenditure volumes compared to 2020. However, a company is not a philanthropic work: its objective is to earn money or, at the very least, not to lose to produce and pay its employees. Hence the importance of the necessary profitability of these essential digital and ecological transitions. The entrepreneur does not invest out of pleasure but out of necessity, it is still necessary that his investments are profitable. This is called the return on investment.
The company establishes a hierarchy, digital first to reorganize after the Covid-19. But this study by the Banque de France Observatory also reveals that, while being less important than digitization, investments by companies (large and small) in the ecological transition also benefited from a certain acceleration last year. , and it will continue.
A third of VSE-SME investments went to this environmental theme, compared to barely a quarter before the crisis. So there too, things are progressing.