“The past year has challenged business like no other in living memory. From the depths of lockdown to the first steps into the hybrid working world, these challenges continued to accentuate an already increasingly complex business environment characterised by increasing regulation and cost pressures. Our Deals, Consulting and Forensics business units making up our Advisory practice have, in the last 12 months, been proactive in assisting our clients to address these challenges.”
After four quarters of negative GDP Growth, Malta’s economy started showing its first signs of recovery in the second quarter of 2021. During that quarter, GDP rose by 13.4% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. The decrease in the number of COVID-19 cases, stemming from the high vaccination rate, as well as the cushioning effect of the Government financial aid packages, helped in safeguarding economic resilience. Unemployment levels increased marginally by 0.7% in 2020, but decreased steadily thereafter, and by mid-2021, unemployment stood at 3.3%, which is below the 2019 level.
Deals
The first few months of the last financial year were dominated by the business community’s COVID-19 response. As the business community adjusted to the new reality of operating within the pandemic environment, as well as the launch of the vaccination programme, we have started seeing business activity picking up. Indeed, more clients sought our assistance to raise and list equity or corporate bonds on the Malta Stock Exchange.
At the same time, we have also seen increased Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity, not only in Malta, but across a number of territories. We continue to be involved in assisting clients in some of the most significant local transactions, particularly in the middle market segment where more companies are seeking consolidation to increase economies of scale and profitability. Furthermore, in the past year, we were involved in a number of due diligence, valuation and tax M&A engagements where together with other PwC network firms, we supported a number of cross border transactions.
In the past year, we carried out a number of engagements involving the valuation of commercial property and other real estate projects, as well as complex financial instruments, intellectual property and other hard-to-value assets, particularly in the financial services sector, the igaming industry and other sectors. Besides providing such services directly to our clients, we continue to provide extensive support to our Assurance practice in fair value assessments, impairment testing and going concern assessments. The requirement for our assistance in these areas became even more essential given the impact of COVID-19 on businesses.
During the past year, we continued to invest heavily in technology upskilling with the aim of providing our staff with the skills necessary to provide more valuable insights to our clients through presentation tools and other digital solutions. When combined with our market and industry expertise, our investments in technology assets and data analytics will continue to allow us to bring deeper, tailored insights to our clients.
Management Consulting
Our Management Consulting practice has continued to support our clients with a broad range of services to help shape their organisation's agenda and address their challenges from strategy through to execution. The past year, more than ever, our clients have been navigating through disruption, and they have needed to determine how to repair, rethink and reconfigure their operations to be resilient through today's rapidly changing business environment.
In FY21, our focus, therefore, has remained on strengthening the support we offer to our clients in both the private and public sector across the wide array of services including strategy, research, people and organisational management, programme management and sustainability. In addition, we have continued to support the public sector in the areas of policy, economics and research.
- Strategy & Market Research
- People and Organisation
- Sustainability
- Policy, Economics & Research
Strategy & Market Research
We have reviewed and defined our clients' business strategy with the perspective of co-creating a sustainable competitive advantage and developing opportunities to both defend their current market position as well to ensure future growth.
Besides strategic consulting work, we have also assisted our clients in developing both strategic and tactical research solutions that provide strategic insight to our clients. These insights help them gather, analyse and visualise data better to drive strategic change, support decision-making, mitigate risk and enhance performance.
People and Organisation
We have supported our clients in various areas including job evaluations, organisation design, performance management, competency frameworks, and HR function transformation. We have also been supporting a large public sector organisation with change management for the implementation of its transformation strategy.
The team also continued to share thought leadership on the topic surrounding the future of work, which included a series of articles on COVID-19 Workforce Challenges & Tips.
Partnering together with the Foundation for Human Resources Development, we carried out the annual HR Pulse Survey that focused on key HR challenges organisations were facing. We also supported in bringing the topic of Upskilling to the agenda of businesses, educational institutions, social partners and policy makers encouraging a call for action in relation to this topic.
Sustainability
Sustainability services represent a growing area within the Consulting practice, where our role has been to help organisations plan, measure and deliver on their wider impact. This past year, we've seen the concepts of ESG gain a lot of traction as businesses seek to manage risks, maximise opportunities and communicate their sustainability journey, all while grappling with a fast-changing regulatory environment. Given the importance of the topic to us as PwC, more detailed information on what has been happening in this space can be found in the section dedicated to ESG within this report.
Policy, Economics & Research
We have also advised a number of family businesses and organisations in the formulation of their business plans, including assistance to SMEs to apply for EU funding for support in various eligible investment projects.
In addition, over the past year, we have also been involved in providing bilateral advisory support to the European Investment Bank (EIB). This support was in relation to the European Investment Fund (EIF) financial instrument for Energy Efficiency (EE) and Renewable Energy (RE) funds. These were administered by selected local financial intermediaries in order to encourage increased investment by both households and enterprises in energy efficiency and renewable energy measures.
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