Exim Bank to offer marketing aid to SMEs

Exim Bank has offered marketing assistance in international market to SMEs based in Gujarat.

The bank is initially focusing on textile, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and cottage industry to promote their products in more than 60 countries.

"We will not only finance to SMEs but we will also provide them marketing assistance," said Devanand Rajak, resident representative & AGM, Exim Bank. He said the bank has recently started this offer in Gujarat while it was also available in a few other states.

Rajak further said, "We will help SMEs in collecting proper information of buyer, sectors and country. We have our overseas offices in Budapest, Johannesburg, London, Singapore and Washington DC from where we collect all information of the buyer."

He also said that the bank offers finance to the buyer in international market so that buyer can import from Gujarat without any credit.

To increase the export from Gujarat, the bank is organising several seminars in Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat and Jamnagar.

"In these cities we are meeting several SMEs to provide finance as well as provide market assistance in international market," said Rajak.

He further said the importance of SME sector is well-recognized world over owing to its significant contribution in achieving various socio-economic objectives, such as employment generation, contribution to national output and exports, fostering new entrepreneurship and to provide depth to the industrial base of the economy.

However, Gujarat has a vibrant SME sector that plays an important role in sustaining economic growth, increasing trade, generating employment and creating new entrepreneurship in India.

"The SMEs require business advisory services to enhance their international competitiveness in a highly competitive globalising world wherein they find the services of reputed national and international consultants as not cost effective and often, not adequately focused," explained Rajak.

"We will provide a suite of services to SMEs that include providing business leads, handholding during the process of winning an export contract and thus assisting the generation of export business on success fee basis, countries/sector information dissemination, capacity building in niche areas such as quality, safety, export marketing and financial advisory services such as loan syndication," he said.