If you were among those who attended D CEO’s invite-only financial executives awards program last night (see event photos at the end of this post; see profiles of all honorees here), you heard Editor Glenn Hunter talk about the critical role CFOs and other numbers crunchers have in defining and executing a company’s strategic plan. This morning, Deloitte released the results of its 1st quarter CFO survey, which show corporations across the country are shifting their focus from cost cutting to revenue growth. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they’re still not ready to pull the trigger on job creation.
Here are some nuggets from the survey. Read the whole thing here.
• An impressive 73 percent of CFOs expect increased revenue from new products and services, and 68 percent expect foreign markets to generate more revenue.
• More than half of CFOs (56 percent) expect their companies’ prices to increase during the next year, driven in part by expectations of rising commodity prices. More than 80 percent of CFOs expect commodity price increases over the next year.
• Revenue growth from existing markets is the most prevalent company challenge, cited by more than half of CFOs (55 percent) as a top three concern.
• CFOs are very concerned about government’s impact on their growth plans, particularly tax policies (especially around the tax code and the repatriation of earnings) and health care reform, which they view as unnecessarily burdensome.
• Despite strong concerns about current tax policies and health care reform, CFOs report neither is substantially impacting their investment of available cash. CFOs say health care reform is not substantially affecting their domestic hiring either, but 45 percent say that changes to corporate taxes would raise hiring at least somewhat.
As promised, here are a few photos from D CEO’s 2011 Financial Executives Awards program, taken by Matthew Shelley:
