The new wave of Covid-19 pandemic is likely to shake the confidence of the country’s business sector as it started recovering from the earlier shocks, according to  survey by South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM). The overall business confidence in January-March 2022 faces decline in comparison to the October-December 2021 quarter, said the findings of the survey released at a webinar in Dhaka on Monday.   It said most of the sectors have expressed lesser confidence for the upcoming quarter, reflecting their growing concern about the advent of Omicron. SANEM Executive Director and Dhaka University Economics Department  Professor Dr Selim Raihan on Monday presented the findings from the think tank’s seventh round of the “Business Confidence Index” survey at a webinar here. The webinar focused on the new wave of Covid-19 pandemic and the state of business confidence in Bangladesh.The survey results showed that Present Business Status Index (PBSI) (year) is approaching the mark of 60 in the October-December 2021 quarter from 56.79 in the earlier quarter, indicating a continuation of improvement.Considerable improvement has been observed in the profitability and sales or export order sub-indicators.Similar to PBSI (year), the PBSI (quarter) points to an improvement in business activities in October-December 2021 quarter in comparison to July-September 2021 quarter. Compared year-on-year, RMG, Textile, Restaurant, Food Processing, and Pharmaceuticals sectors have registered a comparatively faster recovery.Progress in PBSI became slower during the period of Jul-Sep 2021 to Oct-Dec 2021 compared to the previous period of Apr-Jun 2021 to Jul-Sep 2021 quarters.There was a significant gap between Business Status and confidence during the period of Jul-Sep 2020 to Jan-Mar 2021.However, the gap almost fully mitigated during Apr-Jun 2021 and Jul-Sep 2021 when the status and confidence overlapped. But the gap started to rise again from this quarter (Oct-Dec 2021).