DOHA: Total investment in Qatar’s Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector stood about $852.3m in 2015. The country’s SME sector employs over 35,000 workers in 596 manufacturing units, according to the Gulf Organization for Industrial Consulting (GOIC) report.
The workforce in SME sector in the country accounts for 47 percent of the total labour force of over 75,000 workers and professionals in manufacturing industries.
As per the report, there were approximately 13,995 SMEs in the GCC in 2015 of which 11,288 small and 2,707 were medium enterprises that added up to form 82.9 percent of the total 16,890 manufacturing factories in the GCC.
Abdulaziz bin Hamad Al Ageel (pictured), GOIC Secretary General, explained that GOIC’s 2015 statistics revealed that about $15.6bn were invested in the SMEs sector, which was 4 percent of the total industrial investments in the GCC valued at $393.7bn. He further added that approximately $6bn were invested in small enterprises and about $9.5bn in medium enterprises.
In order to classify industries into categories, GOIC relies uniformly on the invested capital as it allows for a distinction to be established between different types of Gulf industries.
According to GOIC, an enterprise is considered small if less than $2m are invested in it, medium if between $2m and $6m are invested and large if $6m and more is invested.
GOIC’s data revealed that in 2015, SMEs’ share of the total manufacturing factories was about 82.8 percent and they employed approximately 44.3 percent of the total labour force despite the limited investments (4 percent of the total manufacturing industries investments).
In terms of labour force, SMEs employed around 721,399 individuals (about 44.3 percent of the total manufacturing industries labour force that counts 1.6 million workers). About 28.7 percent of the 44.3 percent were employed by small enterprises while the remaining 15.6 percent were hired by medium enterprises.
