CEOs Worldwide Grapple With Uncertain Growth Opportunities

Only 30 percent of nearly 4,500 CEOs surveyed worldwide say they are currently very confident in their company’s growth prospects, according to PwC’s Global CEO Survey conducted at the end of last year. Looking ahead to the next three years, that figure rises to just under 50 percent.

Over the past four years, CEO optimism has been on the decline. At the end of 2021, enthusiasm was still buoyed by hope that the coronavirus pandemic was nearing its end. Yet cracks in the global economic outlook had already begun to emerge earlier. By late 2018, and especially in 2019, confidence in the year ahead was weakening, a period easy to forget given what came next.

As the effects of the pandemic gradually normalized, the deeper, underlying weaknesses of the global economy started to resurface. In addition to these challenges, the world is now experiencing further disruptions to global trade, including tariff pressures stemming from policies introduced under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

Historical comparisons are useful when it comes to putting today’s sentiment into perspective. At the height of the pandemic, only 27 percent of CEOs surveyed by PwC believed in their company’s short-term growth prospects, while just 34 percent were confident about the medium term. During the 2008 global financial crisis, optimism was even lower, at 21 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Today, the outlook for 2026 is pretty similar to the levels seen in the post-crisis recovery years of 2010 and 2021, though, notably, confidence appears to be trending downward rather than up.

This text was originally written by Katharina Buchholz in German, see the original here.