MORE than half of island businesses questioned in a survey released yesterday saw profits fall last year.

The annual Business Trends Survey, carried out by Island Analysis for the Chamber of Commerce and Young Business Group, revealed that 39% of businesses saw profitability go down by more than 5% compared with 2008 and that another 17% saw it fall by up to 5%.

It was better news for a fifth of companies, however, with that proportion enjoying profits more than 5% higher than a year previously.

The forecasts for 2010 also painted a more positive picture for the domestic economy, with more than half of the 60 businesses sampled expecting to make a profit and just 21% expecting a loss of some sort.

Chamber president Paul Luxon (pictured) said the findings were largely as expected but was keen to stress that only Chamber-member businesses had taken part in the survey, so it could be merely an indication of what was happening in the island.

‘There’s no real surprises in the sense that the general feedback that we have been getting from business in 2009 was that turnover was down as a result of the worldwide recession and despite efforts by many businesses to trim costs, it wasn’t enough to mitigate against the lower turnover.

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