Return on Investment is the sole determinant of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) use among Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises [MSME's] in India concludes a survey conducted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India [IAMAI] in association with eStatsIndia.com.
The survey was conducted among 1000 MSME’s,most of them IT savvy B2B suppliers in 8 cities of India, Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Pune, Moradabad, Surat and Meerut.
The survey was aimed to open a two-way line of communication between MSME’s and ICT suppliers to fulfill various needs of the respective parties.
In terms of average number of tech product units per MSME, PC/Laptops had the highest penetration followed by printers.The accounting software such as Tally also had a wide presence amongst the surveyors whereas the use of server software was found to be particularly low with an average use of 1 server software per 20 MSME units.
Almost 99 per cent of the units surveyed used directly or indirectly some form of B2B suppliers’ e-marketplaces. These are marketplaces, which lists suppliers for domestic and global market.
One more interesting fact which came to light was that for surveyed companies e-marketplaces generated a business worth 15.9 crores out of their total turnover of 50.9 crores .This clearly shows that the investment in ICT is cleverly based upon the ROI generated through these channels.
The survey also concluded that Indiamart was the most preferred choice among the MSMEs among the B2B e-marketplaces with over 85 per cent of the suppliers preferring it as their first choice, followed by Tradeindia. Alibaba was the most preferred Amongst the global e-marketplaces.
Commenting on the survey findings, Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Indiamart pointed out that the use of e-marketplaces among the MSME’s in India is at very initial stage and as long as such marketplaces continued to show high rates of return, the headroom for growth was almost unlimited. However, success would come only to those emarketplaces which were ready to roll up their sleeves, go to the market and provide an end-to-end solution to the MSME’s, he added.
In this time of capped IT budgets by big financial companies putting serious pressure on ICT sector, increased spending by SME’s could come as a boon. Now the onus is on the companies to integrate their products in such a way that it helps SME’s to cut cost and get higher ROI which in turn would encourage much larger ICT spending in future.
