TTS Group was honoured to be invited to Mediacorp’s Channel 5 live Programme, Talking Point, on the evening of 24th March 2016 to discuss Singapore Budget 2016 which was announced recently by Singapore’s Finance Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat.
Kelvin Foo, TTS Group Director for SE Asia was invited to participate on the specialist panel to give his professional views and comments on the 2016 Budget.
“This was a great opportunity for us to express our views as a Small Medium Enterprise (SME) in Singapore.” says Marc Mrsic, Managing Director and Chairman of TTS Group. “It gives me great satisfaction to see TTS Group moving up in the ranks as a leading SME to be able to provide useful opinions to the public.” said Marc.
The announced Budget 2016 has many encouraging schemes for the SMEs in the midst of the raising concern of a slowing economy and raising costs of doing business in Singapore. To find out more on the list of key items of the Budget which affects the SME, please click on here.
“When I first heard the announcement of the Budget by our Minister Heng Swee Keat, the immediate reaction I had was the budget indeed answered to several immediate needs of the economy, and it was comforting to see that.” said Kelvin Foo, Director, SE Asia. “During the live programme, it was a little different to what was rehearsed and therefore we need to think fast to react to the host, Steve Chia’s questions!”
Indeed, in the programme, Kelvin mentioned that there are two particular schemes noted in the Budget that are quite useful.
The first scheme is the Loan Assistance for SMEs, the Government will introduce a new SME Working Capital Loan scheme, for loans of up to $300,000 per SME. Under this scheme, the Government will co-share 50% of the default risk of these loans with participating financial institutions, to encourage lending to SMEs.
“This Capital Loan scheme will be extremely useful to small companies and will help these companies to overcome cash flow issues. However, we are unsure about the details of this scheme at the moment” said Kelvin.
The other scheme is the Access of Grants from various agencies more easily. The Government will launch the Business Grants Portal which will organise these grants along core business needs of i) capability building, ii) training and iii) international expansion. The portal will start with grants from IE Singapore, SPRING, STB and Design Singapore and progressively include grants from other Government agencies.
“This scheme will allow better accessibility to the grants when they are changed to scheme-centric to company-centric. Companies like ours will be able to access the funds more efficiently rather than finding out which agency offer which grants, at the moment” added Kelvin
To this end, we look forward to the details of the Budget scheme to be unveiled in time to come. We have confidence that this Budget sets a tone right to tackle the immediate concerns that most, if not all, SMEs face.
You can view the entire programme here.
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