The research was conducted among 150 small and medium-sized entrepreneurs in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka and Osijek with the face-to-face survey method.
Small and medium-sized companies make up 99.4 percent of the entire Croatian economy, the survey said, adding that their contribution to Gross Domestic Product is 40 percent.
According to respondents, the biggest challenges they are facing are increasing liquidity (39 percent), cutting administrative costs (30 percent) and financing capital costs (27 percent).
Most of the companies covered by the survey use direct payment (37 percent), bank transfers (25 percent) or cash (17 percent) for covering their costs, and their money sources are internal funds or regular earnings (89 percent) and bank loans (7 percent).
Although 78 percent of those companies possess credit cards, a mere 36 percent of them use them, with six percent citing business cards as the primary payment method.
Surveys of this kind were also conducted in Russia, Ukraine, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.