Enabling SME growth through digital capabilities in South Africa

Enspan是一家为中小型企业(SME)提供一系列数字供应链解决方案的软件公司。中小企业技术采用率低是出了名的，原因有很多，然而，COVID极大地改变了这一状况，并增加了各种规模企业的数字采用率。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(他们受到疫情的严重影响)的发展。在Enspan，我们相信这是一个利用当前数字采用趋势和开拓国际市场，特别是新兴经济体的绝佳机会。我们将南非(SA)确定为一个潜在市场。一项对南非制造业的研究报告称，只有不到75%的中小企业拥有数字商店，不到90%的中小企业手动执行从采购到付款的流程。这严重抑制了中小企业的发展！根据同一项研究，SA采用低技术的原因是该国普遍缺乏数字技能，无法获得合适的技术，负担得起。SA拥有约200,000家制造业中小企业(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(这也是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发展。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这样的公司为我们的产品本地化和商业化提供了大量的公司资金。为什么Enspan很适合南非，反之亦然？我们将在研究期间回答这个问题，但我们的假设是，我们完全适合应对SA挑战。Enspan有一个创新的解决方案，为中小企业提供低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)，并将这些电子商店部署到企业可以访问的中央市场(以帮助满足政府采购要求和支出)。在此研究期间，我们将评估/验证市场和产品，并为南非制定市场进入战略。

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.