Another issue which has risen in importance is dealing with stakeholder expectations, including regulators. This challenge, new to this year’s survey, came 6^th in the list of priorities and reinforced other recent KPMG Australian and global research, which has identified this as a growing challenge both for executive management and board directors. 

Andrew Yates said: “We were not surprised to see dealing with stakeholder and regulator expectations as a key issue. The rise of ESG continues and the recent KPMG International CEO Outlook shows that a quarter of chief executives felt a failure to meet ESG expectations posed a serious threat to their continued tenure. We can only see this issue increasing in significance.”

Talent, perhaps surprisingly, fell to 8^th place in the list – down from joint top last year and a clear first place in 2023. 

Andrew Yates said: “It is interesting to see recruitment and retention of talent sliding down the list, given that unemployment is still at historically low levels.  The large increase in migration during the last 2 years will have played a part in businesses feeling they can meet their staffing needs, and there may be some continuing hangover from the Covid era where many businesses took on additional staff and have kept them. But the lack of skills in key areas of technology is still a clear concern.”

Looking further ahead, 46% of respondents said they would be focused over the next 3-5 years on identifying new markets and opportunities for growth – a significant increase on last year’s 29%.  

Brendan Rynne said: “While the immediate focus for 2025 will be on controlling costs, our survey shows leaders also looking past the current gloomy economic conditions and starting to focus on new growth markets over the next few years, which is a notable change from last year’s survey. We do see things picking up slowly in the second half of the year and our respondents are clearly keen to make moves for growth when that happens.”