Yu Ping, deputy director of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, delivers a speech at the press conference for the 2011 APEC SMEs Summit in Beijing Wednesday. Photo: Jin Jianyu/GT
The 2011 APEC Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) summit committee announced preparations for a formal summit and pledged to help SMEs overcome current hostile economic conditions at a Beijing press conference on Wednesday.
The summit, jointly organized by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, the Sichuan city government and the APEC Business Advisory Council, is to be held from August 29 to 31 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, to promote exchanges among SMEs in the Asia-Pacific region.
It is the fourth time the APEC SMEs committee has held the annual event, having started in 2008. This year’s theme is "The Vigor of Growth."
"SMEs are challenged with capital restrictions, increased operating and labor costs, power shortages and tax burdens," Yang Yunsong, the Chairman of the 2011 APEC SMEs summit, said at the conference.
SMEs, constituting nearly 95 percent of the total companies in China, created two-thirds of total job vacancies and contributed to between 30 and 60 percent of China’s annual GDP, according to Lin Tianfu, the general manager responsible for the SMEs financing management for the northern district of Standard Chartered Bank and the chief financing coordinator of the summit.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 15.8 percent of China's SMEs were facing bankruptcy in the first two months of this year, up 0.3 percent since 2010.
Separately, the statistics of the Zhejiang Provincial Bureau of Statistics revealed that the total production output and profit of manufacturers in Zhejiang in the first half of the year had decreased by 1 percent and 4.4 percent respectively.
“As many as 40 percent of Zhejiang's SMEs face closure this year,” Zhou Dewen, chairman of the Wenzhou Council for Promotion of SMEs, was reported as saying by Chinanews.com.
“Workers’ salaries have increased by 20 percent over the past year, averaging 2,800 yuan (＄435.96) a month this year in our factory,” a person in charge of a medium-sized integrated textile factory in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, who only identified himself by his surname Jin, told the Global Times.
Jin said that the steep escalation of cotton prices and the appreciation of the yuan had crippled his business as well.
“We did not receive a single foreign order last month, while over the same period last year, staff members had to work extra shifts just to keep pace with the vast number of orders,” Jin added.
He also said that it is more difficult now to acquire loans from financial institutions owing to higher lending rates and thresholds.
Lin, the banker, said at the briefing that banks were striving to optimize their credit structures and to consolidate financing to SMEs, especially to innovative firms that showed promise.
Yang, the chairman, also said an international coordination center under the APEC SMEs secretariat would be established to help address globalization and intellectual property issues faced by SMEs.
More than 600 entrepreneurs and economic experts are expected to attend the summit to discuss possible solutions to the challenges that SMEs are currently looking to overcome.