DaRe (Distretto Agroalimentare Regionale of Apulia Region, Italy) has finished the work of the economic assessment of the impact of new technologies on the firms cost structure by means of a cost comparison, and on its revenues, through price prediction models (deliverable N. 6.36).The objective of the deliverable is to present the results of the last year of activities of the Work Package N. 6. The activities aim at measuring the convenience of the new technologies and other types of innovations developed within QUAFETY project in order to evaluate the effective feasibility with a managerial perspective.
The deliverable presents the details related to the activities of the 12 months, such as:
1. Survey to QUAFETY research partners;
2. Survey to industry partners and other companies;
3. Identification of the impacts of innovations on final market, thus, on prices;
4. Identification of the impact of innovations on costs;
5. Calculation of the impacts on profits on the actual representative firms;
6. Financial analysis and Return on investments analysis.
Given the results produced in the first two years of activities, finally, the third and last phase provides a definitive answer to the question concerning the economic viability of QUAFETY innovation.
The first step has concerned a survey to QUAFETY research partners in order to have a fine grain description of the impacts of the outputs of their research in terms of: days of shelf-life increased, improvement in food-safety risk, reduction in laboratory costs, reduction in time of analysis. In addition, respondents provided details about the level of training required for implementing the innovation as well as an estimate of the level of initial investments in order to implement the innovation.
Meanwhile, industry partners have been involved in a second survey in which they have been asked to list and estimate revenues, yearly production, fixed and variable costs, laboratory, personnel and spoilage costs.
Information given by industry has been used as baseline for the estimation of the impacts of QUAFETY innovations using measures such as: unitary costs, break-even point, net present value and internal rate of return. In addition, sensitivity analysis has been carried out starting from the probability distribution of willingness to pay, impacting firm revenues. The implementation of a confidence interval retrieved from willingness to pay estimation has allowed identifying the best base and the worst case market scenario, in order to have a range of variation of the results.
Scientists conclude that the obtained results can provide the financial bases for the investments of the SMEs involved in the project.
Further info: www.quafety.eu