USAid offers assistance to Asean SME programme

“The council is strongly committed to helping the Asean Economic Community become a success,” said Sam Kim, chairman of the council’s Asean committee and vice president of Asean and Asia development markets for Procter & Gamble.
Kim and Alexander Feldman, president of the council, this week led the annual business mission of senior executives from 13 US companies to the Asean Economic Ministers Meeting in Bandar Seri Begawan.
“We will keep working with the ministers to bring the vision of the AEC to life through specific partnerships and policy initiatives that unlock the full potential of Asean as a region,” Kim said.
“In particular, a robust AEC must benefit Asean small and medium enterprises, which comprise 96 per cent of the Asean economy, and we are delighted to announce an expanded SME programme that advances that objective.”
Through the Asean committee led by P&G, United Parcel Service of America (UPS), Hewlett-Packard, General Electric (GE) and Microsoft, the partnership with USAid will build on the council’s SME training programme created at the request of the Asean economic ministers, which offers skills training, knowledge transfer and networking opportunities to SMEs in all 10 Asean nations.
The council’s and USAid’s new Asean connectivity through trade and investment programmes will partner to expand the resources, scope and diversity of SME training in the run-up to the creation of the AEC in 2015.In a statement, Shiumei Lin, vice president of public affairs for UPS and vice chairman of the council’s Asean committee, said that through this new partnership, “we are excited to expand the programme to reach more SMEs and help them integrate into global supply chains”.
Feldman said the Asean Economic Ministers Meeting represented an important opportunity to advance mutually beneficial programmes that helped improve the economic environment in Asean for the council’s members and for business in general.
This year, the council held the second AEM ministers roadshow to the United States in cooperation with that country’s Trade Representative’s Office, Commerce Department and State Department.

Roadshow
The roadshow connected the ministers directly with communities and businesses around the US and represented, along with the expanded SME programme, precisely the types of efforts that exemplify the “win-win” partnerships that the council seeks to build with the AEM, Feldman said.
The firms in the delegation were Citi, Covidien, FedEx, GE, General Motors, Google, Microsoft, Philip Morris International, P&G, Qualcomm, Syngenta, UPS and Visa.
US firms operating in Asean have shown scepticism on the region’s ability to meet the 2015 deadline to establish a single market. In a survey of 475 senior US business executives from the region conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore and the US Chamber of Commerce, 52 per cent said they “do not think that the AEC’s goals will be realised by 2015”.
Of those who doubt Asean will reach its deadline, nearly 60 per cent “think that Asean will not reach AEC’s goals until 2020 or later”Only 23 per cent of all executives questioned believe that Asean will meet its 2015 goal, the poll showed.