The old adage, “when it rain it pours” can never ring truer for what some of the small entrepreneurs are facing under this difficult circumstances. With Covid-19 rearing its ugly head once again, the current wave of cases has forced the government to enforce full lockdown, subsequently dashing all hopes for these business owners to consider recovering from MCO 1.0 and 2.0.
In view of this current predicament faced by the industry, the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development and Cooperatives and its agencies have stepped up to offer moratorium and targeted assistance for their customer base and clients. Agencies under the Ministry, Bank Rakyat is setting aside RM500 million for the initiative by giving 3 month moratorium and 50% reduction in monthly installment for 6 months, SME Bank on the hand is allocating RM28 million for the exercise with the rest following suit with various assistance totaling estimated value of RM746.79 million.
Based on current records and data, the assistance offered is expected to benefit a total of 734,707 borrowers and tenants of the agencies, micro enterprises as well as informal businesses, including those in the B40 category. Minister Dato Sri Wan Junaidi said the SMEs, particularly micro and informal businesses, are among the groups severely affected by the third nationwide movement control order (MCO 3.0) and require all the help that they can get to stay afloat. The Ministry conducted a survey to gauge the impact of MCO 2.0 on SME sector, the response were sobering where more than half of the respondents said that they are uncertain of the future and can only sustain their businesses for three to six months should the lockdown order continues.
“Many of these small businesses do not have much savings to fall back to and because of that they need all the assistance they can get to survive. We hope the moratorium and targeted assistance provided by agencies under MEDAC would help them in these trying times,” he said.
To get a better understanding on the impact of MCO 3.0, the Minister has instructed for another survey this time to include micro enterprises as well as informal businesses. Since more than 80 percent of the SMEs provides products and services that are in the non-essential services, he said many of the industry players will be affected the lockdown this time round, which is more stringent that the previous one. The survey also revealed other problems faced by the entrepreneurs like COVID-19 fatigue following the many uncertainties particularly on operational SOPs.
With insights from such surveys, MEDAC hopes to come up with better targeted assistance and programmes that would best suit the SMEs.
