“But we think things can be better if SME Corp looks into all the various aspects and functions executed by these different parties so that we can minimise or avoid any overlapping,” he said.
As SME Corp will be the secretariat for the National SME Development Council, to be chaired by Prime Minister, “we can again better coordinate with various ministries and agencies”, he added.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak yesterday announced the rebranding of the Small and Medium Industries Development Corporation (Smidec) to SME Corp, with the aim of developing a competitive and resilient SME sector to overcome the economic crisis.
SME Corp, which is expected to begin operations next month, will act, among others, as an information and one-stop referral centre, coordinate data and programmes, and undertake research pertaining to SMEs.
It will report to the council and be placed under the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
Earlier in his address, Mukhriz said as at May 2009, from 384 applications received, a total of 276 applications had been approved, amounting of RM16.47 million, under the matching grants for the development and promotion of halal products.
In the same period, from 1,371 applications received, 750 applications had been approved, amounting to RM428.29 million, under the soft loans for SMEs, he said.
For the soft loans for information and communications technology (ICT) adoption, Mukhriz said that from 101 applications received, 26 applications had been approved, totalling RM50.01 million, as at May this year.
On the small number of approvals compared to applications received, the deputy minister said: “We are little shorthanded.”
“Our promotion has been overly successful. At one particular time, we had 20 officers working on 20,000 applications, so obviously there’s a bottleneck,” he said.
The agency has been hiring staff to look into reducing the backlog, Mukhriz said, adding that the backlog “is in the thousands and growing on a daily basis”.
“We expect within the next three months the backlog will be cleared and from then on we will be able to get back on track with our KPIs (key performance indicators) in terms of the time spend on processing these applications,” he said.
Asked whether the backlog will affect promotions, Mukhriz said: “We do a lot of promotions and roadshows, and these have to continue. We can’t stop as these have been somewhat successful and of course, due to that, we create this backlog.”
An estimated 567,480 SMEs are operating in the country and their contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to rise to 37 per cent in 2010 from 32 per cent in 2005. – Bernama
