Friday, March 01, 2013

Can SMEs survive in Singapore?


SMEs face the following challenges:
- high rental of premises
- high wages and turnover of local workers
- local workers prefer to work for big companies
- supply of foreign workers has been cut sharply

The Government tries to help with the following:
- 40% wage subsidy based on increase in wages given to local workers
- cash grant of $5,000 (last year)
- productivity and innovation credits

Self employed workers are able to cope quite well, e.g
- taxi drivers
- food stalls

But, running a company to employ local workers is challenging.

What can be done to help small businesses, which has not been tried successfully yet?

4 comments:

  1. I suggest a bond of a few years for SME employees in exchange for proper training and higher wages.

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  2. I also suggest profit-sharing scheme between owners of SMEs and employees. This may translate to better productivity, commitment and lower employee turnover rate.

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  3. Owners of SME must:
    1.Go for training in people management
    2.Go for training in process designs

    Governments must:
    1.Not give tax payer's money to them
    2.Allow them to fail

    Workers will naturally want to work for SME if the SMEs improve their work process which should be better than large businesses.

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  4. S'pore ought to study & adopt some practices of the German model which SMEs dominate the economy instead of PAP State Capitalism dragging us into the gutter.

    Many sinkies need to relook into their mentality of having a big daddy/mummy company name on their namecard to boost their self-esteem.

    ReplyDelete