New policies support small and micro-enterprises

Beijing (CNS) –New government policies will keep small and micro-enterprises from facing funding issues or experiencing shutdowns in large numbers, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) forecast on Tuesday.

With the increasing cost of raw materials and labor, small and micro-enterprises were under great pressure to create profits or even survive in the first half of 2011, said Zhu Hongren, chief engineer at the ministry.

The central government has already launched a number of favorable policies to support micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), he added. Nine fiscal measures were introduced to ease financing difficulty for SMEs in October 2011, while at the beginning of February the government set up a fund of 15 billion yuan to support development.

The government will also allocate a certain quota for SMEs in its procurement, he said.

Companies with less than 20 employees in sectors such as manufacturing and transportation (or no more than 10 employees in the retail, catering and IT sectors) are classified as micro-enterprises, the MIIT said in a notice on its website.