Meet SMEs needs
An Industry Canada study shows that to obtain the capital necessary to meet the needs of their business projects, Canadian SMEs depend on the following available financial resources (and to what proportion):
- Retained earnings – 57.1%
- Commercial or personal loans from financial institutions – 64.3%
- Supplier credit – 20.7%
- Personal savings – 53.9%
- Leasing – 21.6%
- Government financing and subsidy assistance – 7%
- Loans from employees, family and friends – 10.4%
- Loans from other unrelated individuals (angels investors) – 4.1%
- Micro-credit – 2.4%
- Other financing sources – 3%
It is surprising that only 7% of businesses rely on financial assistance programs and subsidies from governments to obtain the capital necessary to achieve their projects.
Moreover, businesses with 100 to 499 employees (1.7% of businesses) obtain 50% more assistance than those with 1 to 99 employees (98.2% of business). Another major fact: Over 60% of SMEs that incur over 20% of their R&D expenses have never used subsidies.
According to the study, this situation stems from entrepreneurs’ lack of knowledge regarding the large number of programs available for businesses and especially their difficulties to access information.
This study also reports that 100% of young entrepreneurs surveyed said that the lack of centralized and coordinated information on available programs often make access problematic.
Another study found that in 2011, Canada counted 2,405,323 businesses, of which 1,122,306 had at least one employee. There are 2.67 million self-employed workers in Canada. In Quebec, there are:
- A total of 494,673 businesses;
- 244,490 businesses with at least one employee;
- 250,183 independent entrepreneurs.
In Quebec, 239,832 companies have less than 100 employees. The majority of them have enormous capital needs in certain fields such as training, networking, marketing, business and resource management, and acquisition and access to technology.
