By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-15 13:58

The government is encouraging privately run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to put greater emphasis on technological innovation and play an increasingly important role in China's economic growth in the years to come.

Wang Liming, vice-director of the SME Department under the National Development and Reform Commission, said the nation is actually doing all it can to help SMEs expand at home and abroad.

He believes Chinese SMEs will certainly become a new force driving the future growth of the economy.

By the end of last year, more than 42 million SMEs had been registered in China, representing more than 99 percent of the country's total number of enterprises. SMEs contributed more than 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006.

Many heavyweight Chinese companies have developed from SMEs in the past decades, including Haier, Lenovo, Hisense and Huawei.

Guangdong, which borders the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, has the largest number of SMEs on the Chinese mainland. Its SMEs have played an increasingly important role in local economic growth in recent years.

By the end of June, Guangdong had registered around 400,000 privately run SMEs with a total investment of more than 500 billion yuan. The province's SMEs currently employ more than 3.8 million people from around the country.

"Chinese SMEs have now entered a new era of fast development," Wang noted.

He urged them to seize every opportunity for further upgrade and to try to increase their presence in both the domestic and international markets.

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