The SME Hub is a direct Private Sector Engagement (PSE) of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) with the local company ICT Hub LLC. The SDC and ICT Hub jointly established a facility called “SME Hub” to bundle, in a “one-stop-shop,” different sources of funding and private-sector advisory services already available in Serbia to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector. The SME Hub makes such services more accessible and customizes them to the needs of domestic SMEs to contribute to increased competitiveness and enable them to access global value chains (GVC) by becoming suppliers of multinational companies (MNCs).
The overall goal of the SME Hub is to enable Serbian manufacturing SMEs to offer more and better jobs, higher wages, and better working conditions while reducing the intensity of their environmental footprint. This will be realized by supporting manufacturing SMEs to accelerate their growth and using private advisory services and available public and private financing sources to access larger, more stable, or profitable business-to-business (B2B) markets.
SME HUB, with the involvement of several interested parties and experts from the private sector, offers a full service, which will start with researching the needs of multinational and large domestic companies through scouting, selection of small and medium-sized enterprises, diagnostics, and creation of a transformation plan, management, and supervision of capacity improvement, ensuring access to finance, until the moment when the Serbian company signs a cooperation agreement with a multinational or large local company.
SDC and ICT Hub’s initiative gathers and works closely with key interest groups, including manufacturing SMEs, MNCs producing in Serbia, service providers, and banks. It collaborates with other relevant stakeholders. The SME Hub works with manufacturing SMEs from Serbia, focusing on SMEs from underdeveloped regions of the country.