The government yesterday approved 500 million baht in new measures to help abate the negative effects of the baht's appreciation on small and medium-sized enterprises.
The measures cover training programmes jointly conducted by the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Bank, the Bank of Thailand, and Export-Import Bank of Thailand and the Thai Bankers' Association to improve SMEs' competitiveness and promote their knowledge about the importance of foreign exchange risk management and effective tools to ease them.
Eligible SMEs for the training programme must have maximum sales of 400 million baht a year.
The first stage has the government offering a coupon worth 30,000 baht to 5,000 SMEs who attend the training course and are clients of commercial banks or specialised financial institutions.
The coupons cannot be traded, transferred, exchanged or converted into cash. The coupon is only allowed to be used as a discount to purchase hedging options from commercial and state banks.
The programme is scheduled to run until June 2018.
According to the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (Osmep), in 2016, out of 3 million SMEs, only 20,371 or 0.7% are exporters. Some 12,620 are both importers and exporters.
Exports from SMEs totalled 2.19 trillion baht, accounting for 29% of the country's total export volume.
Only 20% of SMEs dealing in exports currently hedge against foreign exchange risks, reported Osmep.
The baht has risen by 8.2% against the dollar this year, making it the best performing currency in Asia, underpinned by foreign inflows and record reserves of US$200 billion (6.6 trillion baht).
According to Industry Minister Industry Minister Uttama Savanayana, the SME promotion committee yesterday also approved 2.21 billion baht from the fiscal 2018 budget to support SMEs.
The funding includes 141.5 million baht to develop startups, 505.9 million to increase productivity and rehabilitate SMEs, 40.8 million to increase their competitiveness and 531.3 million to develop the SME ecosystem.
