How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Utilization of the Company’s Working Capital?

Industrial production has long been among the dominant sectors of Slovakia’s economy. Its share in the creation of GDP is an average of 17%. As a result of the adopted government measures related to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, industrial production in Slovakia fell by 26.7% in April 2020 compared to March 2020, which was reflected in several financial and economic characteristics of individual enterprises. The aim of this article is to investigate the changes in the management of working capital items in industrial production enterprises in Slovakia caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine changes in working capital management using selected activity ratios, specifically using the asset turnover ratio, the inventory turnover period, the short-term receivables turnover period, the short-term liabilities turnover period, and the cash conversion cycle. We conduct research on a sample of 3541 enterprises of all size categories between 2017 and 2021. We evaluate changes in the inter-annual values of selected activity indicators by calculating growth rates and averages, verifying the statistical significance of changes using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test at a significance level of 5%. The results show a decrease in the turnover of assets in 2020, an increase in the turnover period of inventories, receivables and liabilities, and a decrease of the cash conversion cycle.