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Singapore haS become SucceSSful in a hurry. aS a reSult we’re
a society short on empathy and emotion comment&analysis • 8
todayonline.com We set you thinking
Friday, 19 october 2012 MICA (P) 093/06/2012
SMEs want morehelp from GovtSumita Sreedharan
SINGAPORE — In spite o an aggres-sive productivity drive — withmillions o dollars ploughed intothe national efort — just slightlymore than hal o the respondentsin a survey o managers in smalland medium enterprises (SME)agree with the Government’s callor higher productivity.
At the sam e t ime, one in twoelt the Government is not doingenough to “help support businesses become more productive”.
Nevertheless, in the ace o amanpower crunch, two in threeSME managers said they haveimplemented some productivitymeasures on their own such assending more sta or trainingand development courses as wellas upgrading current equipmentand technology.
The survey also ound that mostSME managers are aware o Gov-ernment assistance programmes, but application to the schemes ap-pears to be relatively low, rangingrom 18 per cent or i nvestmentunds/equity inancing to 40 percent or tax incentives.
The survey, SIM Mana gementMonitor, was conducted by the Sin-gapore Institute o Management(SIM) between June and July.
It seeks to provide a deeper un-derstanding o management atti-tudes, outlook and landscape here. As par t o t he sur vey, 2 30 SMEmanagers were polled, out o a to-tal o about 780 respondents.
Acc ord ing to obser ver s, thendings suggest that the Govern-ment has to do more to reach outto decision-makers in SMEs, whichorm the lieblood o the Republic’seconomy, to get them to utilise theavailable schemes.
SMEs contribute to hal o Sin-gapore’s gross domestic productand employ 7 in 10 o the workorcehere.
Currently, SMEs can seek helprom SPRING Singapore throughits ve enterprise development cen-tres as well as its EnterpriseOneportal, which ofers one-stop help.
Still, SME ma nagers TODAYspoke to cited a ear o red tapeand paperwork, as well as a lack o
In terms ofgrants, thereis a lot of helpfor SMEs toinnovateand raiseproductivity but the SMEshave toknow whatto do next.
Mr Damien Tonghr and admin
manager at Seng hua
hng foodStuff
China growth slows to7.4% but worst likely over September data on retail sales, xed asset investment and industrial output fag rebound
chinese economy
continued on page 2continued on page 2
hot neWs • 4
‘I fElTREbORN’
Shawn Huang,29, is the
frst personto undergo
simultaneouspancreas and
kidney transplantin Singapore.
Armstrong to lose S$36.5 million as more sponsors pull out sports • 66
Mr Shawn Huang withMs Manjit Kaur, AssistantDirector or ClinicalTransplant, who helpedcoordinate the surgery.
bEIJING — China’s economy slowed ora seventh straight quarter in the Ju-ly-to-September period, missing thegovernment’s target or the rst timesince the depths o the global nan-cial crisis, but other data released yesterday suggested that the world’ssecond-largest economy had turnedthe corner.
China has been a major engine o global growth in recent years, as the
United States and Europe have strug-gled to overcome the nancial crisis.The weakness in the Western econo-mies has, however, weighed on China’sexport sector, slowing its once red-hoteconomy.
The Chinese economy expanded by7.4 per cent in the third quarter romthe corresponding period a year ear-lier, the National Bureau o Statis-tics (NBS) said yesterday, down romthe 7.6 per cent growth in the secondquarter and in line with analysts’ ex-pectations.
While the number would be causeor joy in recession-stalked Westerneconomies, it represents a sharp slow-
down or China, where growth has av-eraged an annual rate around 10 percent or three decades. Indeed, thethird-quarter GDP reading represent-ed the rst miss o the ocial targetsince the rst quarter o 2009.
Nonetheless, yesterday’s readingadded up to annual economic growtho 7.7 per cent in the rst nine monthso the year, setting China up to beator exceed the government’s target o 7.5 per cent or this year.
“We are conident that we canachieve 7.5 per cent ull-year growthor above,” NBS spokesman Sheng Lai- yun said.
