(Universidad de Cuenca, 2025-06-26) Aguirre Quezada, Ximena Alexandra; Rey Campero, Carlos Ricardo
The objective of this research was to establish the effect of three financial factors: net working capital, return on assets and capital structure. A mixed correlational approach was applied, with a non-experimental design and longitudinal cut. The population consisted of 1,246,162 active manufacturing SMEs, and the population was 374 companies. The technique used was documentary analysis. The results showed that liquidity has progressively improved with 0.755 in 2021, 0.814 in 2022 and 0.962 in 2023. Working capital presented variations throughout the periods with 234,828 in 2021, 45,519 in 2022 and 78,357 in 2023. While the return on assets was volatile with 2.6% in 2021, -0.7% in 2022 and 13.5% in 2023, the capital structure has had a trend where companies have reduced their dependence on debt with 0.605 in 2021, 0.553 in 2022 and 0.547 in 2023. It is concluded that of the three defined financial factors affecting the liquidity of Ecuadorian manufacturing SMEs, working capital has a strong and significant positive relationship, followed by return on assets as a moderate positive relationship and finally capital structure with a weak positive relationship. Therefore, when there is effective management of net working capital, liquidity is improved, since companies can make efficient use of their resources to cover their obligations.
