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Scale-Ups Confidence Survey 2024

A high level of confidence

Scale-ups play a crucial role in economies through innovation and job creation, but scaling up in times of geopolitical and economic instability presents formidable challenges. Investors might hesitate to invest in smaller firms and top talent can prefer the security of larger organisations. To clarify the challenges and key focuses of scale-ups, Deloitte conducted a survey with 42 such companies in Switzerland, aiming to provide valuable insights into their growth trajectories, the challenges they face, and their strategic outlook. The Swiss Scale-up Survey was conducted as part of Pan-European Scale-up Survey, which covered more than 350 scale-ups from 5 different countries.

Key findings

 

  • The biggest challenges relate to cash flow, liquidity
    While lower/delayed new business and customer signings remain a challenging topic mentioned by 50% of our respondents, 52% of Swiss scale-ups indicated cash flow, liquidity and funding issues as the biggest challenges, which surpassed delay in or focus on product development resulting in lower sales (26%).

  • Finding new customers remains top focus for scale-ups
    As indicated by 62% of respondents, scale-ups continue to prioritise new customer acquisition as their main strategy for realising their growth ambitions, while additional funding and partnerships are just below with 57% and 55% of respondents highlighting these focus areas.
  • Scale-ups remain conservative regarding their workforce growth
    While 59% of scale-ups plans to grow their headcount in 2024, 12% of the companies continue to plan a reduction in workforce. Simultaneously, European scale-ups, contrarily to Swiss scale-ups, continue to struggle with finding the right talent, such as STEM profiles, technical and engineering FTEs, etc. This difference might be attributable to the presence of strong science and technology institutes in Switzerland, like EPFL and ETH, that have a reputation to train highly-skilled talent.

  • Scale-ups are increasingly turning to equity funding from new investors rather than government grants & subsidies
    66% of Swiss scale-ups reported a negative impact on their valuation (compared to 63% in Europe). Additionally, there is a noticeable preference towards relying more on equity funding from new investors (79%) rather than opting for government grants and subsidies (36%).

  • (Highly) confident scale-ups are the majority, concern among scale-ups is rather limited
    Overall, the confidence of scale-ups remains high in 2024, with 69% of Swiss respondents stating that they are (highly) confident to continue or accelerate their growth trajectory. The overall confidence score is 7.3.

 

About the survey

 

This survey is part of the Deloitte NSE Scale-Ups Ecosystem initiative.

In total, 42 scale-ups based in Switzerland responded to the 2024 Scale-Ups Confidence Survey. Around 76% of the Swiss respondents hold the position of CEO or co- founder in their respective organisations.

Scale-ups from various segments participated in the survey, with Life Sciences & Health Care, FinTech, and Electronic devices, hardware & semiconductors representing the top 3. The majority of the respondents operate within a B2B context, with a workforce of below 10 full-time employees and revenues below 500K euros.
 

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