The Vocento Next Spain forum stops in Valencia this Thursday with a day that tries to value the company as an engine of growth
The business future is projected through different aspects, on a global scale, but also locally. Challenges such as digitization, wealth creation, knowledge transfer or sustainability, in addition to promoting employment, require a permanent adaptation effort from the industrial fabric. This is a national and trans-European challenge that explains the birth of the Next Spain forum, an initiative promoted by Vocento that stops in Valencia this Thursday precisely to reflect on the central role played by SMEs as an engine of growth.
The event, organized by Las Provincias, will take place at 9:30 am at the Las Arenas spa hotel. Agustín Moro, Global Director of Open Innovation Partnerships at Telefónica, will be in charge of the initial presentation.
The program then includes two panel discussions; In the first, Andrés Gurrea (Managing Partner of Grant Thornton Valencia) and Felipe Pulido (Commercial Director of CaixaBank Companies in the Valencian Community) will reflect on the role played by the services sector in the universe of SMEs and the solutions it offers. In the second round table, the attending public will learn about a series of success stories that will contribute to illuminating the experience of small and medium-sized companies in the Community. Yaiza Canosa (CEO & Founder of GOI), Vicente Montesinos (chairman of the Board of Directors of Cuatroochenta) and Javier Gayá García-Manso (chief financial officer of Hoff) will offer the example of their companies as an inspiring model for the Valencian business community.
The country (and the company) we want
Under the ambitious motto of ‘The country we want’, in the middle of last December Vocento launched its new Next Spain initiative, an editorial effort that is also a call to convene around this idea (confidence in a bright future, short term, for the whole of Spain) to the different actors scattered throughout the territory who participate in the same idea. It will be an initiative that will be deployed in different thematic areas that, in the case of Valencia, puts the focus on the essential sector of small and medium-sized companies, an area of special notoriety in the Community that must be read in transnational terms: with a European vocation .
In fact, the professor at the University of Valencia César Camisón, in the study he directed on behalf of the Consell in 2017, already alluded to that scenario that is projected towards the EU: Valencian SMEs represented 99.8% of the population that year. regional economic structure «and they provide 64% of employment», pointed out the professor of the Department of Business Management, who x-rayed the European territory with a series of statistics. For example, it noted that “SMEs and especially micro-enterprises are the basis of entrepreneurial dynamism” on a European scale and underlined that of the 2.3 million new companies created in the EU in 2012, 70.8% were by entrepreneurs individuals without dependent employees. And more data: in the EU, 92.7% of the 22.3 million non-financial companies that exist are micro-enterprises with less than 10 employees, 7.1% small or medium-sized firms that do not reach 250 workers, and only 0.2% large companies. A long statistical series from which Camisón deduced that “SMEs are a main inhabitant of modern economic systems, due to their direct contribution to job creation in critical times and, indirectly, to the economic and social progress of a community.” In short, an essential contribution to building the country (and the company) that we want.
The conference, which counts with the participation of CaixaBank, Telefónica and Gran Thornton as global partners and with the collaboration of Balearia, Correos and CEV, will close with the intervention of Carolina Pascual, Minister of Innovation, Universities, Science and Digital Society of the Generalitat .
It will be the second stage of a project that began last year in Malaga and that during 2002 will go to other parts of Spain. Planned as a great meeting to strengthen the future of our SMEs, the Next Spain forum brings together the main players in the economic and business world to address the challenges of the sector in the European context and in an increasingly digitalized world. The conference can be followed live through the website of this newspaper.