GCNP: What do you see as the biggest challenges of this pandemic, for your organisation and for SMEs in general?

AM: This is a very complicated question to answer to, since the current uncertainties, coming from the unclear direction of the Covid-19 pandemic and of the external markets themselves, mean that we cannot have any king of certainty.

Nevertheless, in the short term, the challenges are easier to enumerate, from the cash flow difficulties caused by the lack of revenue, resulting from the freezing of orders by our customers, late payments and/or very long payment deadlines to the extension of shipments of goods. All this affects a company's cash flow.

In addition to the above, we feel the decrease in orders for this production season, which is Autumn/Winter 2020, but, in our opinion, the greatest difficulties will be felt in the production season of Spring/Summer 2021, from September onwards, for the following reasons there is a decrease in the number of developments that would give rise to production; the market is not yet adapted to a new way of selling, that is, without the physical international fairs, brands will have to reinvent themselves in the way they sell their product, but as everything is still new, the next season will suffer; and, no less seriously, this summer's unsold stock, both in small businesses and large distributors, and even in customers' own warehouses, will have to be recycled and reused next summer, so the production window for summer products will diminish substantially.

On a more internal level, and because we are a footwear manufacturing company, with standardized production based on individual labour in chain, we feel some labour shortage since several employees are staying home, either by prophylactic quarantine due to some symptom similar to Covid-19, or because they have some pathology that requires care and social and professional distance, or because they have to stay home to take care of children, parents or grandparents who require assistance. As a result, there is a drop in daily production and a loss of labour profitability.

In fact, we can say that what I have just mentioned are the current challenges of our company, but there are many constraints that prevent a certainty about future challenges, because we do not know if the market will react slowly, opening little by little and encouraging normal consumption and restoring confidence, just as we do not know if a second wave of Covid-19 will come, causing a catastrophic effect with the closure of all trade and forcing, again, the confinement. In this catastrophic scenario, we would experience very difficult periods of economic and social collapse, with a devastating effect on the economy and on SMEs.

In a very general way, I think we can say that these problems and challenges are or can be very similar to the ones of any other SME in the production and export business.

GCNP: What is your organisation doing specifically to respond to the new market challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic?

AM: The typology of our product itself does not allow for re-adaptation, i.e. we produce footwear on the instructions of our external customers, we export 100% of our production and depend on their developments. For now, the market is still trying to understand its own needs.

At this moment we have the productive season already "closed", or better saying, the developments of prototypes and samples that we made last season gave origin to the productions that we will have until the middle of August and there isn't much that we can do or reinvent to change, in any way, the type of product we produce, firstly because there aren't great alternatives in our branch, secondly because we depend on the instructions of our external clients, coming from the Italian, French, Dutch and English middle/high market brands.

However, we are considering 3D developments at an early stage, not using physical samples, to facilitate remote development meetings through video call, this is, in casu, one of the only measures that have been implemented here in the company, something that until now was not very well received by our customers.

GCNP: What do you think should be done, namely by the SMEs, so that the economy recovers from this crisis and a more resilient society is built?

AP: At this moment, the only thing we can do is to reinforce health and safety measures at work, both for the integrity of our employees' health, but also to prevent companies from being forced to shut down due to administrative impositions because of the rise in new cases of Covid19. With this we will be helping to prevent the spread of this pandemic and, in effect, helping the economy not to stop.

GCNP: Do you think the world will stay the same after this pandemic?

AP:If we learn from history, we learn that all major events in the past, whether negative or positive, have left their mark. From the ends of history, societies evolve. And now it will be no different. My grandmother, when I was hurt as a child, used to tell me: "Don't worry, because it swells, deflates and passes! In my humble opinion, that's what's going to happen, because while everything is still very present, people will limit social proximity, they will limit affection, hugs and human warmth, but in time everything will pass, people will forget and, little by little, everything will return to normal. Regardless of this, I am sure that some hygiene rules will be maintained forever, whether in public institutions, public spaces, shopping areas, restaurants and even in our companies where those rules have always existed, but were not fully respected, as the difficulty we always had in imposing the use of protective material in our facilities and now we even feel a proactivity on the part of employees in their use.

There will be a change in terms of social awareness and of paying attention to the signs of nature. This experience we have lived through will ensure that any subsequent news of an outbreak in China will not be devalued by everything and everyone who represents us, the same people who had and have the obligation of sanitary control and the world, European or national decision-making power.

Therefore, the big question is to know how long this "swells, swells and passes" will take, because we will have a big economic recession and a huge fall in the consumption of non-essential goods, the big question is to know if there will be any setbacks in this apparent regression of the pandemic in Europe. Everything will depend on the dissemination of the pandemic, the development of a vaccine and/or treatment, because only then will there be, again, confidence for people to forget and go back to the life of before: go out, consume and embrace!