Welcome to Souqalmal.com Business, where entrepreneurs and SME founders and owners can go to find banking products available to SMEs and stories written about and by SMEs.
As you will often hear, there are around 200,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which, combined, account for 94 percent of all companies in the UAE, 90 percent of the workforce and 60 percent of the GDP. Two-thirds of SMEs are in trade and retail, 16 percent in services and 11 percent in manufacturing.
From personal experience, it’s often hard for those businesses to actually find out what’s going on and what products are available to them. Our survey showed that only 28 percent of SMEs in the UAE took any business financing.
On Souqalmal.com you can now find listings of 70+ Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, Business Finance Loans and Equipment Finance products available to SMEs in the UAE.
If you join the SME Business Club you will get our regular newsletters as well as special offers such as discounts with Aramex and Careem.
There is also a wealth of news and guides about SMEs available, from the Dubai SME Top 100 ranking to a comparison of UAE free zones, the most popular commercial property areas to rent in Dubai according to PropertyFinder, and my very own seven steps to setting up your business.
We also have guest authors writing on subjects close to an SME’s heart such as digital marketing, PR and reputation and how to hire (and fire) well. If you’d like to write an article, please email us at talktous@souqalmal.com.
Finally we have also launched a members-only LinkedIn community for SMEs, just for SME owners to discuss issues they face and to share tips and advise. We will shortly be posting the results of our SME banking survey there, so be sure to join if you run an SME business.
