SINGAPORE SMALL BUSINESSES CONFIDENT IN 2018

SINGAPORE, Mar. 15, 2018/Medianet International-AsiaNet/ --

Small businesses in Singapore are showing a strong pick-up in confidence in 2018, according to a new survey released today.

The findings, from CPA Australia's eighth annual Asia-Pacific Small Business Survey, follow extensive surveying of nearly 3,000 small business operators in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Mainland China.

CPA Australia's Head of Policy, Paul Drum FCPA said the outlook for 2018 is strong, with 57.0 per cent of businesses expecting to grow, even as Singapore's small businesses experienced weaker growth in 2017.

"While 2017 saw the lowest number of Singapore small businesses that reported growing since 2014, many expressed a high level of confidence in the Singapore economy and in their own growth prospects for 2018.

"Fifty-seven per cent of small businesses in Singapore are expecting to grow in 2018, the best result for Singapore since the 2012 survey" Mr Drum said.

The survey results again showed that businesses that are applying digital technologies in their business are significantly more likely to be growing strongly than businesses that are not.

In comparison to Australia and New Zealand, Singapore's small business sector is more digitally capable, with a significant majority using social media for business purposes, and nearly four in ten businesses earning more than ten per cent of their income from online sales.

"Singapore's small businesses could, however, benefit from a stronger focus on new digital payment options, such as AliPay, ApplePay and WeChat Pay. Only 30.2 per cent allow customers to pay through this technology, well below China (65.5 per cent) and the survey average (42.7 per cent).

"With Singapore's excellent communications infrastructure and world-leading support for small businesses, we expect Singapore's small businesses to move quickly to invest in new payment technologies.

"The results show investments into new technologies are likely to have a fairly quick and positive impact on the bottom line of many small businesses. 35.1 per cent of Singapore respondents that invested in technology in 2017 stated that such an investment has already resulted in improvements in profitability," Mr Drum said.

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