Kantar, which recently completed 27 years of tracking MSME market in India across 48 cities, has released its ITOPS 2022 study, which highlights that the pandemic had hit the MSME businesses hard, but the segment has bounced back. Further, it states that the Indian economy and the MSME business outlook appears extremely positive despite the worry of the global economic scenario.
“While MSMEs have bounced back from COVID, it is important for them to continue with this positive mindset. It will only prevail if positivity gets translated into higher revenue and profitability. Given MSMEs are the lifeline of the Indian business economy with contribution of 99.8% to all businesses in India and contributing to almost a third of the total GDP of the country, significant responsibility lies with the government to help them grow,” said Indranil Dutta, Vice President, Insights Division, Kantar.
As the budget for FY 2023-24 is just round the corner, I am quite hopeful that the Indian government shall continue to instill confidence in such businesses by providing attractive schemes and roadmap to flourish.
- The pandemic has proven the resilience of the MSMEs and more MSMEs are also looking to invest in their business than in the past as they feel that the economy will continue to do well and somehow be insulated from probable global slowdown.
- This is evident from the fact that the MSMEs that are defined as “wave-riders” (Businesses that invest in-line with the economic growth of the country in order to stay competitive in the market)) have increased too.
- Similarly, these businesses are quite confident about their industry doing well. While only 1 out of 10 businesses were extremely confident about this in 2021, we have seen that more than 3/4th of the businesses are hopeful of a strong growth in their industry now.
Looking at the current scenario, it is important to mention that the current vision of MSMEs is not myopic one. More than half of the businesses are confident about increasing their revenue and executing their business plan for the next 5 years.
- It is worthy to mention that there is a very keen interest in investing in technology and going digital is growing. Kantar has noticed that they have started investing heavily on these areas post pandemic and currently, there are very few MSMEs in India that are not exploring digital technology for their business. This is because of the demonstrable benefit that digital and technology has brought forth during the last couple of years.
“As the budget for FY 2023-24 is just round the corner, I am quite hopeful that the Indian government shall continue to instill confidence in such businesses by providing attractive schemes and roadmap to flourish.” noted Dutta.
