In my recent Sandhill.com article, Rethinking SaaS for India, I encouraged people to go after the huge addressable opportunity in providing SaaS solutions to the SMB sector in India. Last week Business World ran a cover story, Rebirth of Small Enterprise, (free registration required) that underlines the scale and scope of the opportunity. The article finds that there is “new-found resurgence” of the SME sector in India. Some extracts from the cover story…
Small and medium enterprises have become darlings of corporate India…. In the past five years, small companies have performed better than their larger counterparts…. in growth of net sales and operating profit…. What’s more, the SME sector has become a big market. For instance, an AMI Partners study says that SMEs will invest up to $1.2 billion on their Internet infrastructure and solutions this year, about one sixth of the total IT spend for all companies at $7.7 billion this year.
Consultants Dun and Bradstreet have identified auto components, textiles, food processing, pharma, engineering and chemicals as sectors in which India SMEs could become globally competitive.
…the Indian experience with SMEs is not unique. Charles Harvie of the University of Wollonggon in Australia has pointed out the … contribution of SMEs as an entrepreneurial engine of East Asia’s [growth] …it is clear that SMEs do provide the lion’s share of growth.
Hi,
I enjoyed reading your article “Rethinking SaaS for India”. It is very informative and also provides lot of useful data about the size of the SMBs across Industries - Garments, Retail etc. I think there is a dearth of this kind of data. Nasscom may have it but I hardly saw any free report when I searched there site.
How do you see opportunities for Startups in this area?
Thanks!
>>How do you see opportunities for Startups in this area?
The opportunities are good. However this is a challenging area as a successful template hasn’t yet emerged. I am seeing new startups germinating but it’ll take a couple of years before they have meaningful traction and become visible.