On the sidelines of the 13^th APEC SME Ministerial Meeting, VOVNews reporter interviewed Mr Roger Wigglesworth, Director of the SMEs Industry and Regional Development under the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development about the contents of the meeting and cooperation opportunities between Vietnam and New Zealand.

VOV: What do you think about Vietnamese themes at the meeting?

Mr Wigglesworth: The themes Vietnam has chosen for the whole year, particularly for the SME meeting is very important and correct. However, it is very important to create a favourable business environment in which SMEs can flourish. If you have a nice business environment, all businesses (not just SMEs) will grow.

VOV: One of the proposals at the meeting is to facilitate SME’s accession to financial recourses. What do you think about the proposal? Can you share your experience in this issue?

Mr Wigglesworth: There are a lot of international debates about financial resources for SMEs. For example, in New Zealand, almost all SMEs that asked for money in 2004 got all the money they wanted.

To facilitate SMEs’ accession to financial resources, it is better for SMEs to have a good business plan, good business ideas and especially good managers. If they have better managers, they will have better plans and better finance control measures. So, financial organisations will be willing to give them money as they can see that this is the business that is likely to be successful in the future.

Therefore, at the meeting, we try to share our best practices and experiences to build the capacity for managers of SMEs to help them manage their enterprises more effectively.

VOV: The initiative of Indonesia at the meeting is to set up micro-banks to support micro enterprises. What do you think about the initiative?

Mr Wigglesworth: Indonesia has been providing micro-enterprises with finance for a very long time. They have banks that specialize in providing that funding for enterprises. They are very successful in implementing the model. Therefore, Indonesia has a lot of experiences to teach us in the field. Australia and India have also successfully implemented community projects which support micro enterprises.

VOV: To strengthen cooperation among SMEs in the APEC region, what should we do?

Mr Wigglesworth: What we are trying to do is to encourage them to form working groups. Therefore, the meeting will offer good opportunities for APEC member economies to learn experiences and ideas from each other, especially when they face challenges to the development of SMEs in their own economies. Nothing is really unique. The meeting is also definitely valuable for member economies to talk about their finance and technology problems. We also have more meetings like this in future, where we are going to share with each other about how to start a business in our economies, to license business and government schemes to access finance.

VOV: How to train good entrepreneurs?

Mr Wigglesworth: All over the world, economies always raise the question of how to find or train good entrepreneurs. We also ask the same question in New Zealand. Like your country, we are worrying about how to get more young people in the businesses. We have the schemes at universities, high schools to find good students which have potential to become good entrepreneurs and help take their ideas and turn them into commercial purposes. We do not have the answer but like other countries we try to make more people understand the importance of business.

VOV: What do you think about cooperation opportunities between Vietnam and New Zealand in future?

Mr Wigglesworth: I think there are a lot of opportunities as New Zealand have cooperated with Vietnam in a variety of projects for several years, not only on SMEs. And I think that agriculture or agriculture production is a good field for us to cooperate. We also have some projects in Vietnam in which we will pass our knowledge of agricultural technology to your country.