Business Performance Of Small Medium Enterprises Research Articles

ICT Usage and Business Performance of SMEs in Sri Lanka: The Mediation Effect of Bounded Rationality

The study examined empirically how Information & Communication Technology (ICT) usage affects the bounded rationality and business performance of Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lankan. Data were collected from 400 of SMEs employing structural questionnaire having the face to face interviews. The Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to analyze the data. The results discovered that ICT usage in the organization perfectly makes a significant positive impact on business performance as well as negatively influenced the bounded rationality. Simultaneously, the study uniquely found that bounded rationality makes a negative impact on business performance. Meanwhile, bounded rationality plays a dominant role in the relationship between ICT usage and business performance. The study strongly recommends SMEs to strengthen the usage of ICT especially, mobile technology with applications that play a leading role to develop the SMEs by enhancing the decision-making power.

Incorporating Social Networks in Business Relationships of Retail SMEs for Better Business Performance

The presence of hypermarkets with modern retail format has impacted the performance of retail small medium-enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. The challenges of remaining competitive and the ability to sustain the business have pushed many retail SMEs to cease operations within a short period after commencement. Despite these challenges, retail SMEs can still attain competitive advantage through the strategies of strengthening and maintaining business relationships with their social networks. This study postulates that fostering social networks, specifically on the notion of homophily or similarities among social network members, is able to lure valuable resources needed by retail SMEs in achieving superior business performance. Unfortunately, only few studies have focused on social networks from within the Asian context and many tend to overlook the importance of social networks specifically in retailing. This study also suggests the relationship between value and status similarities of retail SMEs and their ability to coordinate efforts in horizontal relationships. Therefore, this study extends the discussion on the role of social networks towards better business performance of retail SMEs in Malaysia by conceptualizing a framework indicating the importance of value and status homophily on coordination of activities leading to business performance of retail SMEs.

Competitiveness of Indonesian Small and Medium Food Processing Industry: Does the Location Matter?

In this paper, we compare the competitiveness between clustered and dispersed Small Medium Enterprises(SMEs) in Indonesian food processing industry. This study was driven by the important role of SMEs inIndonesian food processing industry for helping low income people access the low price foods. Furthermore, asIndonesian Government implements policy that support clustered SMEs, it could be expected that SMEs in thecluster area could pursue and emphasize different performance than their non clustered counterparts. Primarydata was collected in West Java, Indonesia. The sample includes only companies with fewer than 100 employeesand those operate in the food processing industry. We put market orientation, innovation, and businessperformance as proxy of competitiveness. Mean comparison statistics was used to compare market orientation,innovation and business performance of clustered and dispersed SMEs. The main findings were found throughdata analysis notably there was significant difference between clustered and non clustered SMEs in marketorientation, innovation and business performance.