EC to invest Rs 1.6 cr on awareness campaign

The European Commission (EC) has come up with a Rs 1.6 crore fund to spread awareness about the trade opportunities for India's small and medium enterprises with EC member countries.

The programme will provide training and orientation to Indian firms for business with the EU. Similarly, EU companies will also be informed about the Indian market. To assess market readiness of Indian firms individual company audits are planned. The companies will get guidence to be fully ready for the EU market.

"The Asia-Invest Programme is designed to promote business cooperation between companies, especially SMEs, with members of the EU, south and south-east Asia and China. They will be provided necessary information to internationalise their business strategies, to make decisions on partnerships, markets and investments. The programme provides financial and technical support for meetings that promote direct contacts between business managers," said Nishikant Haté, EC's advisor in India.

"SMEs in European IT sector need new business opportunities. At the same time, a number of European companies from other sectors are looking at cost cutting through offshoring or outsourcing," he added.

The first proposed interaction session is the 'EU-Karnataka IT Asia Interprise 2006', which is a two-day event. It aims to stimulate business cooperation between SMEs in India and 10 EU members.

The programme to be held in Bangalore in October will see participation from EC member countries like Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Spain and UK.

The event will also spread awareness about EU and its policies, its IT markets, and initiatives, capabilities and requirements in the sector.

"We intend to focus on application developemnt (core software development area), content development (application such as web-sites, multimedia, education, animation, web-based training), consulting (project management, certification, R&D), product testing and ITES (IT enabled services including business process outsourcing), said Kant Singh, secretary general, EU Chamber.