Many corporate pension plan sponsors face a significant increase in pension contributions and expense in 2012, adversely affecting competitiveness, investment and job growth and possibly creating a further drag on corporate earnings and cash flow. That troubling outlook is the backdrop for the major concerns of 192 senior-level financial executives surveyed by Mercer and CFO Research Services.
More than half of the finance executives surveyed (59%) said that their company’s defined benefit pension plan poses at least a moderate risk to their companies’ near-term financial performance. According to more than half the survey respondents, the impact of DB plans on company health is a focus of attention of equity analysts and investors and nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said it was a focus of credit analysts and rating agencies.
