CHENNAI: The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India have a more positive outlook towards their development and business prospects despite the financial meltdown. In an interaction with the media on the current trends in the SME sector here on Wednesday, Dheeraj Dikshit, Head - SME, Commercial Banking, HSBC, said that SMEs in India had witnessed perceptible growth notwithstanding the impact of economic slowdown on them since last October and the bad patch they had been made to undergo following recession.
“Of course there is a fall in exports. The last seven to eight months are pretty challenging to the SME sector though there are signs of revival in the economy of late,’’ he said.
“SMEs are normally suppliers to big units and their significance cannot be underestimated in the current economic scenario,’’ he said and added that the October downturn had impacted SMEs, affecting their export potential to a great extent.
Stressing on the need to help SMEs through restructuring of their operations, Dheeraj said that a bank like HSBC had been helping the sector in many ways through its networks all over India and abroad, lending finance for very specific purposes despite the risks in the current environment.
For exporter’s confirmation, SMEs rely upon HSBC’s global presence and the bank has been operating from Singapore and London and the volume of business has remained at $25-30 million.
“There is a significant amount of business in Tirupur and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and the high volume of market is with the UK, France, US and Europe. HSBC is helping the exporters to make use of the inventory available with the bank.
He said that India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hongkong and Bangladesh formed the Asia focus though the opening up of larger banks in Pakistan and Sri Lanka was on the SME space.
The HSBC has defined exposures and remained selective on the country and bank and the customers as well, he said.
There are 14 million SME customers in India and HSBC has 70,000 of them, he said.
