Abu Dhabi’s business sector regulator, The Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development (ADDED) is executing its micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSME) coalition project in partnership with more than 40 federal and local government and semi-government entities as well as the private sector.
The initiative is designed to create a tightly knit system that helps these companies and promotes innovation, knowledge exchange and the expansion of these organizations’ scope, in order to improve their competitiveness. The project also strives to interactively link the coalition with development priorities and emirate’s future initiatives.
Chairman of ADDED, Mohammed Ali Al Shorafa stressed that this strategic project is in line with Abu Dhabi’s commitment to strengthen the role of MSMEs and startups in economic development by enabling them to contribute effectively to the emirate’s GDP.
Al Shorafa said that the MSMEs sector plays an important role in the economic development of UAE in general and Abu Dhabi in particular. Therefore, the UAE leadership’s vision for the next 50 years gives great importance to improving the segment’s competitiveness and encouraging innovation within its ecosystem.
The success of the project depends on the extent of interaction among the members of the alliance and their commitment to supporting mergers and acquisitions between companies by ensuring capabilities development, financing, facilitating business, the opening of target markets, and driving innovation, Al Shorafa explained.
He said that the project will utilize extensive survey results of mSMEs, which was conducted to create an integrated database from which the project can pursue its goals. He pointed out that a decision defining micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) was issues by ADDED based on their capital and the size of the workforce.
The survey data provided by the Statistics Center – Abu Dhabi, SCAD, shows that the total number of the MSMEs in Abu Dhabi touched 54,234 in 2018, of which 33,760 are micro-enterprises; 18,945 are small enterprises and 1,529 are medium enterprises. According to the data, the total production value of these projects amounted to $88.40 billion, Al Shorafa added
The project focuses on supporting mSMEs engaging in highly skilled fields, particularly information technology, innovative solutions, science, healthcare as well as patent owners that will be supported by mortgages from leading banks.
