Nurturing local enterprises and tackling rising costs

Underlining the importance of nurturing and developing local enterprises, the Finance Minister announced additional funding for the SME Co-Investment Fund and the Singapore Global Enterprises (SGE) initiative.

SME Co-Investment Fund

Budget 2023 announced that $150 million will be added to the SME Co-Investment Fund which catalyses the supply of capital to local SMEs through co-investment with the private sector. As such, we believe that SMEs with scale-up ambitions and clear growth roadmaps will be the biggest beneficiaries of this as capital will naturally find its way to the most promising companies with the brightest ideas.

SGE Initiative

An additional funding of $1 billion has been set aside for the SGE initiative to provide customised assistance to promising large local enterprises (LLEs) in areas such as innovation, capability building and internationalisation.

LLEs typically face issues such as growth saturation in the home market and incremental exposure to global disruptive forces. Thus, LLEs will need comprehensive support to continuously innovate their business models and capabilities, as well as develop growth in new markets. This support is timely as recent results of PwC's 26th Annual Global CEO Survey revealed that nearly 40% of global CEOs surveyed do not think their companies will be economically viable a decade from now if they continue on their current paths.

Help to deal with rising business costs

To alleviate the burden on businesses, the Finance Minister also announced the following measures to help businesses cope with rising interest rates and energy prices:

The extension of the enhancement to the Enterprise Financing Scheme until 31 March 2024 which will be a welcome source of affordable debt financing where the Government will undertake enhanced risk-sharing of between 50% to 70%.
The extension of the Energy Efficiency Grant for another year until 31 March 2024 for food and beverage, retail and food manufacturing businesses to encourage them to adopt energy-efficient solutions for long term cost savings.