Recently I was perusing the slides from the launch of the EU Finance Day for SMEs initiative held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I found the following information interesting.
- There are 23 million SMEs in the EU (99% of all enterprises) and they account for about 75 million jobs.
- SMEs are defined as firms with less than 250 employees and annual turnover of less than €50 million and/or annual balance less than €43 million.
- Small enterprises are defined as having less than 50 employees.
- Micro enterprises are defined as having less than 10 employees.
- Main Business constraints for SME’s:
- Purchasing power of customers(46%)
- Administrative regulations (36%)
- Lack of human resources (35%)
- Cost of human resources (33%)
- Infrastructure problems (23%)
- Limited access to finance (21%)
- 70% of SMEs have no or few R&D activities.
- 20% of SMEs (termed “technology adoption enterprises”) adapt existing technologies.
- Less that 10% of SMEs (termed “Leading Technology Users”) develop or combine existing technologies on an innovative level.
- Less than 3% of SMEs (termed “Technology Pioneers”) have high levels of research activities.
I am keeping a close eye on when the EU Finance Day for SMEs is going to happen in Ireland and I’ll post here as soon as I find out.