Tuesday, July 3, 2012

National SME 100 AWARDS announced at India SME FORUM

Mumbai:  Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role for the growth of Indian economy by contributing 45% of industrial output, 40% of exports and employing millions of people across industries.

However, in order to sustain their growth and contribution to the nation, they need to be supported and equipped with the right amount of knowledge on marketing, funding, tax management, rating, logistics, IT and people management. The India SME Forum a not for profit initiative, has launched a 12-city free knowledge forum series to groom aspiring and eligible SMEs on various business aspects and enable them to elevate their business to the next level. The objectives of the forum are to foster the development of a flourishing entrepreneurial culture and a competitive SMEs sector to support economic development.

The forum has K V Srinivasan CEO of Reliance Commercial Finance, Mr Lakshman Gullugothu, CEO of BSE SME Exchange, Mr Parag Patki, CEO of SME Rating Agency of India and Mr V K Agarwal, President of FISME on its Jury board amongst other luminaries.

The Forum is supported by Reliance Commercial Finance, the Federation of Indian Small and Medium Enterprises, the lending arm of Reliance Capital Ltd, Bloomberg UTV, Go Airlines, SDRC, Mahindra & Mahindra and other associates.

The core strategies put in place by the Forum for bringing about a greater role of SME's in India's economic development includes Listening, Sharing and Advocating for a Pro-Business Environment and Identifying, Enabling and Seeding Innovative Start-ups and Recognising, Grooming and Supporting, Promising SMEs. The first round of the knowledge forums will be held in Jaipur, Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Kochi, Bengaluru, Surat, Indore & Mumbai starting from June 26 to September 18, 2012.
In line with the strategy to groom promising SMEs, the India SME 100 ranking will act as catalyst to identify such SMEs and recognise them for eventually becoming large global-oriented companies.

The awards also hope to inspire willing and able SMEs that have the potential to be world-class enterprises and offer them the platform to promote themselves to investors and partners to sustain growth. The Awards are aimed at:

- Celebrating India's top performing SMEs
- Creating greater awareness of the importance of SME development
- Creating a national motivational psyche in the nation's social and business community
- Encouraging SME role models to share their best practices in management
- Marketing the capabilities of the winning SMEs to regional and global investors
- Providing opportunities for SMEs to network and raise capital
- Identifying a continuous and sustainable pipeline of SMEs for a potential secondary listing of SMEs (IPO) that can attract equity capital for growth
- Providing development path for SMEs to graduate
- Supporting a culture of transparency, corporate governance and best practice sharing.
Nominations from all over India from SMEs will be invited till 15th August 2012 and winners will be shortlisted after a stringent selection process. The results for 2012 will be announced in Mumbai on October 6, 2012.

"The Awards which are being awarded not only for the top 100 performers in the SME segment, but also to the 20 most innovative, 20 most people oriented, 20 most export oriented and also to CSR aware organizations, shall definitely spur a new movement amongst the SMEs, to follow the footsteps of the winners and create a sustainable mechanism to reward and recognize them." said Mr V K Agarwal, President of FISME.

"We understand the importance of SMEs and endeavour to enable them to expand their business by providing tailor-made loans. By partnering with an initiative such as this, we are happy to extend our philosophy beyond financial solutions." said Mr. K. V. Srinivasan, CEO, Reliance Commercial Finance.

"The India SME Forum has been created with the mission to foster development of a flourishing entrepreneurial culture and a competitive SME sector to support economic development. We want to encourage knowledge sharing and want to recognize India's top performing SMEs", said Lakshman Gugullothu, CEO, BSE SME Exchange.

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