“What is worrying is that a few dozen very large companies are showing a remarkable increase in turnover, while thousands of small and medium-sized companies are striving to survive,” pointed out the president of ESEE, Stavros Kafounis, following the analysis by the ESEE Institute on the turnover in retail stores in the first half of 2025.
As he underlined, the fact that small businesses are affected more than very small ones is also of great interest, an element that shows that the size of the company is not always the determining factor in their competitiveness.
“However, it is clear that the growth of the economy does not have a substantial impact on a large part of the market. Only with targeted measures, such as those proposed by ESEE in its memorandum, can the thousands of commercial businesses, which are currently, justifiably, anxious, take a breather,” he noted.
According to Kafounis, for the first time, a scientific study records the true picture of retail trade as a whole, but also according to the size of businesses.
“The analysis of the ESEE Institute on ELSTAT data for the first half of 2025 presents important evidence about the image of the sector that should concern them. It is not only that the marginal increase in turnover is actually being wiped out by inflation and that it constitutes the lowest performance of the last five years in terms of turnover change compared to the corresponding half of the previous year,” he noted.
