Enabling SME growth through digital capabilities in South Africa

通过南非的数字能力促进中小企业发展

• 批准号: 10019049
• 金额: $ 2.65万
• 依托单位: ENSPAN INNOVATIONS LTD
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Collaborative R&D
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=10019049
• 关键词: Enabling; SME; growth; through; digital

Enspan is a software company offering a range of digital supply chain solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are well known for low tech adoption for a number of reasons, however, COVID greatly contributed to changing that and increasing digital adoption by businesses of all sizes. It also prompted a series of government initiatives around the world to support the growth of SMEs (who were greatly impacted by the pandemic).At Enspan, we believe this is a great opportunity to capitalize on the current trend of digital adoption and explore international markets, especially emerging economies. We identified South Africa (SA) as a potential market. A study of the manufacturing sector in South Africa reports that less than 75% of SMEs have digital stores and less than more than 90% perform procure-to-pay processes manually. This significantly inhibits SME growth! According to the same study, low tech adoption in SA is due to a general shortage of digital skills in the country, lack of access to suitable technology, affordability. SA has circa 200,000 manufacturing SMEs (Enspan's key target customer) creating a sizable target market for Enspan.Additionally (and what makes SA extremely attractive to Enspan), the government issued several regulations to support SME development and growth require corporations to source part of their materials from SME suppliers and spend part of net income on supply chain development. Corporations are currently struggling to comply with such regulations and are looking for solutions. This situation resulted in pools of corporate funding for companies like Enspan to localize and commercialize our product.Why Enspan is a good fit for South Africa and vice versa? We will answer this question during our study, but our going-in hypothesis is that we are perfectly suited to address SA challenges. Enspan has an innovative solution to offer SMEs a low-to-no-integration and low-cost solution to quickly activate e-stores (to support growth) and roll up such e-stores to a centralized marketplace accessible by corporations (to help meet government procurement requirements and spend).During this study we will assess/validate the market and product and develop a market entry strategy for South Africa.

Enspan是一家软件公司，为中小型企业提供一系列数字供应链解决方案。众所周知，中小企业的技术采用率较低，原因有很多，然而，COVID大大改变了这一点，并增加了各种规模企业的数字化采用。这也促使世界各地的政府采取了一系列措施来支持中小企业的增长（这些企业受到疫情的严重影响）。在Enspan，我们相信这是一个利用当前数字化趋势并开拓国际市场，特别是新兴经济体的绝佳机会。我们认为南非（SA）是一个潜在市场。一项针对南非制造业的研究报告显示，不到75%的中小企业拥有数字商店，不到90%的中小企业手动执行采购到支付流程。这严重阻碍了中小企业的发展！根据同一项研究，南非的技术采用率低是由于该国普遍缺乏数字技能，无法获得合适的技术，负担能力差。SA拥有大约20万个制造业中小企业（Enspan的主要目标客户），为Enspan创造了一个相当大的目标市场。此外（也是SA对Enspan极具吸引力的原因），政府发布了几项法规来支持中小企业的发展和增长，要求企业从中小企业供应商那里采购部分材料，并将部分净收入用于供应链开发。企业目前正在努力遵守这些规定，并正在寻找解决方案。这种情况导致像Enspan这样的公司获得了大量的企业资金，以使我们的产品本地化和商业化。为什么Enspan非常适合南非，反之亦然？我们将在研究中回答这个问题，但我们的假设是，我们完全适合解决SA挑战。Enspan有一个创新的解决方案，为中小企业提供一个低到无集成和低成本的解决方案，以快速激活电子商店（以支持增长），并将这些电子商店滚动到企业可以访问的集中市场（以帮助满足政府采购要求和支出）。在这项研究中，我们将评估/验证市场和产品，并为南非制定市场进入战略。