Establishing The Challenges Affecting South African SMEs
By M. Cant, J. Wiid. 2013
224 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cant and Ligthelm (2003) estimate that 70-80 percent of SMEs fail. A number of elements and challenges have been identified as contributing factors to the high failure rate of SMEs in South Africa. The research investigates the extent to which the identified variables affect South African SMEs. The objective of this paper is to determine to what extent SMEs experience selected challenges or issues that negatively influence the success of the business. Challenges and issues include exogenous macro environmental variables and endogenous environmental variables, namely marketing. A questionnaire was constructed and judgement sampling was used to gather the responses of 81 SMEs. The research identified inflation and interest rates, crime and unemployment, low demand for products, the wrong pricing strategies implemented and the location of the business to be the major problems experienced by SMEs. The challenge now is to improve the skills and capabilities of SMEs to ensure their success as they play a vital role in the South African economy.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81f778e9f708d747b67cb999a46fd6fae90960ea
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Citations in the corpus
- The Impact of Entrepreneurial Resilience on the Success of Small and Medium Enterprises in South Africa (2018, background): “The high failure can have negative implications on the ability of SMEs to contribute to South Africa’s sustainable development [10].”
- Factors affecting the performance of small and medium enterprises in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (2016, unknown): “Inflation not only affects SMEs, but also their consumers, as it increases the costs of goods and decreases their disposable income (Cant & Wiid, 2013).”