Sustainability for SMEs: value protection and growth lever. Marc Miralles, April 2026.

For years, sustainability has been perceived by many SMEs as an added administrative burden: questionnaires, audits, metrics and reports that respond more to external demands from large customers, investors, financial institutions or regulators, than to a business need. However, this view is becoming obsolete in a context marked by market volatility, uncertainty and disruptions in supply chains, growing and unbalanced regulatory pressure across geographies, and increased consumer and market scrutiny. Sustainability, properly understood and integrated, is proving to be one of the most effective tools to protect value and activate new growth levers, especially in European SMEs.

Suma Capital’s experience as an investor in SMEs and low/mid-market in Spain and southern Europe is very illustrative: value is not destroyed by assuming a greater climate or social ambition, but by not managing it with economic rigour. When sustainability is integrated into long-term management, and not limited to a reporting exercise, it becomes a tangible competitive advantage.

Protecting value in an environment of increasing risk

SMEs start from a structurally more vulnerable position than large corporations. Lower financial margins for manoeuvre, greater dependence on some customers or suppliers, and less capacity to absorb external shocks, making environmental, social and regulatory risks have a proportionally greater impact on your income statement.

From this perspective, sustainability acts as a value protection mechanism in three key dimensions:

1. Operational efficiency and costs. The improvement of energy efficiency, the progressive electrification of processes and fleets, or renewable self-consumption are non-ideological economic decisions. In many energy-intensive industrial and service sectors, these levers allow for reduced OPEX, stabilise costs and improve resilience against price volatility. BCG studies (October 2025) in private markets show that initiatives linked to decarbonization and efficiency can generate EBITDA increases of between 4% and 7%.

2. Regulatory and market risk management. Transparency, traceability and environmental compliance requirements are not optional in today’s market. Anticipating reduces the risk of sanctions, exclusion from tenders or tenders, or the loss of key contracts in increasingly international value chains subject to scrutiny.

3. Operational continuity and human capital. Job security, job stability and talent attraction are increasingly linked to responsible practices. Evidence shows that improvements in employee safety and satisfaction translate into higher productivity and lower costs associated with turnover, absenteeism or accidents.
 
From protection to growth: a new phase for SMEs

The real transformation occurs when sustainability ceases to be defensive and is led as a lever for growth, where paradoxically SMEs have an advantage: their agility.

The World Economic Forum and BCG (December 2025) estimate that the green economy already exceeds 5 trillion dollars per year and could exceed 7 trillion by 2030, becoming one of the largest engines of global growth. This growth is not limited to large technology corporations: it encompasses energy efficiency, circular economy, sustainable logistics, lower-impact materials, climate adaptation solutions, and enabling services, among many others. For European SMEs, this translates into concrete opportunities:

• Access to new markets and customers. More and more companies are incorporating environmental and social criteria into their purchasing processes. Having differentiated products, processes or services allows you to maintain share, access large international customers and, often, capture price premiums.

• Product and business model innovation. Circularity, servitization or eco-design should not be understood as theoretical concepts. Well applied, they allow life cycles to be extended, reduce dependence on raw materials and obtain additional lines of income.

• Better access to financing. Empirical evidence shows that companies with exposure to green revenues are perceived as lower risk and access capital under better conditions, even at lower average cost, in addition to increasing their attractiveness and valuation for private investors.

In the companies in which Suma Capital has a stake, sustainability is explicitly incorporated into the value creation plans: investment in efficient CAPEX, development of new lines linked to energy transition or climate adaptation, and a clear narrative that connects environmental performance with financial results. The result is a more robust and resilient business project, and a more defensible increasing valuation.

As Stanford ESG research Value creation in private equity: from rethoric to return (January 2026) shows, the positive impact appears when sustainability initiatives are tied to clear financial levers – margin, growth, risk – and not when they remain abstract objectives. One of the recurring learnings is clear: it is not a matter of measuring more, but of measuring better. SMEs do not need dozens of indicators, but a reduced set of relevant, traceable and actionable metrics, directly connected to their operations and their market. Starting with imperfect but useful data is preferable to waiting for the perfect system.

A call to action

Europe and Spain are facing a decisive decade for their business fabric. SMEs, which account for the majority of employment and economic activity, are also more exposed to the risks of the green transition. Ignoring this reality is a high-risk strategy.

Sustainability is a lever for competitiveness, resilience and future value. Investors, company management teams and public administrations must act with pragmatism and ambition: integrate sustainability into management, provide financing for transformation and accelerate the transition as an economic opportunity, not as a fashion trend. The smaller the company, the greater the risk of not acting, but in turn, the greater the potential to create value if sustainability is placed next to the business purpose.

Marc Miralles

Head of Sustainability, Suma Capital.

Suma Capital is a member of Fundación Empresa & Clima.