Relevance of community based platform for small and medium enterprises in business markets

Abstract

This project offered us an opportunity to examine the SME s challenges in increasingly global economy, workings of community based platform both in B2C and B2B world, but with special focus on B2B platforms. We investigated various successful B2Ccommunity based platforms like linux kernel development project, linkedIn, Facebook etc. and observed some critical factors which can decide success or failure of the business. Though there are various B2B platforms mushrooming around the world, but from Indian SME s perspective we observed 3 B2B platforms holds importance. These 3 B2B portals are Alibaba.com, MFG.com and IndaMart.com. Out of these 3 Alibaba.com is a Chinese company, MFG.com has focused on Europe and US and India Mart has an Indian origin. Alibaba and MFG, though origin is not Indian, they have been very successful in their respective geography and attempting to penetrate in Indian market. We investigated Business model, customer and business analysis on various factors and compared them on various parameters and found that Alibaba is in much better shape for further success, followed by MFG and then IndiaMart. Having investigated SME s challenges and global economy and workings of B2B portals, we moved onto measure the marriage of two. We did thorough field work and interviewed 10 SMEs operating in various industries including fabric, yarn, paper, aluminum, garments, machine tools, oxygen and ozone generators, plastics, steel etc. out of 10 SMEs, we did detailed interviews with 5 of them and other 5 were handed out the questionnaire mentioned in Appendix. We found that SMEs are benefitting from B2Bportals in many ways. Based on value framework from Anderson and Narus, we found that these portals are providing great help in establishing international business channels for SMEs, acquiring customers beyond nation boundaries and helping them with technology for sustaining the customers. We also investigated if these B2B portals can act as a congregation of SMEs to deal with large international buyers like Wal-Mart, Sears, Dell, Delphi etc, we found there are some trends towards this as well. In the end we concluded that, though there has been continuous effort on government spart to bring SMEs on the fore-front of the economic growth and integrate with global supply chain, but those efforts have with met limited success. The B2B portals on the other hand have been playing much more active role in this space and the model has been embraced by SMEs, as it has shown spectacular results