The world is full of opportunities in the shape of unexplored global markets. The world’s export by WTO members in 2017 was USD 22.45 Trillion and WTO has predicted a 4.4% growth in global trade for the coming year. This means more demand in the global markets, which eventually means, more opportunities for SMEs to sell their product and take advantage of the vacuum between current supply and foreseen world demand.
India is home to over 65 million SMEs but unfortunately only a fraction of them enter overseas markets, that too with a greater degree of risk. Even the ones, who have managed to explore the overseas market, do so with great degree of skepticism and exercise over cautiousness as global trade is perceived to be complex and risky for SMEs. Similarly, only a fraction of 445 million+ emerging market SMEs trade with India because of lack of credible information on trade insights, trade resources and trade counterparts here in India.
Seeing this glaring gap, Pawan established his global trade venture, Connect2India, with a single goal of evolving and simplifying the complete global trade ecosystem in India. The vision was to enable and empower Indian SMEs to export/import globally and overseas SMEs to effectively export/import with India by making global trade safe and easy with technology. Connect2India, as the name suggests, is a bridge to connect the world to India and vice versa.
Connect2India enables end-2-end export/import and provides credible, verified and holistic view on and for Indian and overseas SMEs, complements those with trade intelligence, competitive insights, unique predictive analytics, trade counterparts, expert trade resources and tools etc. to build a complete solution for SMEs global trade needs.
“We are bridging the knowledge & information gap and are making global trade safe & easy with technology. SMEs need support and handholding at every step of the process, so a part solution wouldn’t have helped them. So, we came up with a Managed Marketplace for Global Trade with end-2-end solutions for export/import, including trade initiation, facilitation and execution” says Pawan.
With a fast growing economy, expanding global market, middle class of nearly 300 Million+, and digital penetration of 400 Million+, the opportunities for SMEs are immense. Unfortunately, Indian SMEs are losing on the opportunity of exploring growth via export/import channel because of lack of global awareness, global visibility and access to global opportunities.
All these SMEs would jump on a chance to export but have no clue how to go about it and also how could they mitigate risks around quality and payment, among other issues. They are just not aware of what to export, where to export, when to export, whom to export, how to export, how to manage paperwork, how to manage export finance, how to ensure payment, whom to approach to help with export execution etc.
The global trade barriers are difficult to overcome with limited knowledge, information and resources available to SMEs. Further, the lack of a credible platform to identify and verify global opportunities, limited access to market research and trade intelligence, and high cost of trade information has been dissuading SMEs so far to enter into the uncharted territories of global markets.
“In a market place; where selling various ‘versions of leads’ at multiple levels has already stereotyped the customer’s mind into believing that this is what they want; it is more about creating awareness than a selling effort. The SMEs are not even aware of the challenges that they might face ‘if’ they actually even managed to generate an inquiry from this bare minimum piece of information.” adds Pawan
Connect2India came up with a holistic approach to address the actual concerns of Indian SMEs by providing then an integrated global trade platform and end-2-end managed solution for export/import.
“When your customers are not even aware what they ‘need’ it becomes our added responsibility to educate and guide them as well. We have to make sure that the trade counterparts that we are recommending to customers are genuine and our work doesn’t stop there. If we really want SMEs to be able to export/import, we need to guide them every step of the way and that’s what we offer at Connect2India… The holistic solution” say Daksh Gupta, Director International Trade.
Since the platform launch in end April 2016, the platform and the numbers have continued to grow aggressively. The platform currently has 14 Million+ Unique Google Organic Impressions per month, 2 Billion+ worldwide global trade stats, 7.5 Million listed SMEs, 9 Million+ Unique Google URLs, 2 Million+ Global Trade counterparts and serve more than 850,000 Google Crawl requests per day.
“The focus since the beginning has been to build a very strong foundation and deliver tangible value to customers. This strong foundation is not on one single aspect but on multiple aspects such as technology platform, leadership team, company culture, sales & marketing, customer success etc. I believe if the foundation is strong, it makes it easy to scale and grow aggressively”, says Pawan
India is world’s fastest growing economy and is expected to grow at a rate of 7.4% this year and 7.8% next year, according to a recently released IMF Economic Outlook. Indian exports have shown a steady growth and the exports were up by 16.13% in April-August 2018. Although it seems to be a good progress in the direction of achieving our intended target of USD 900 Billion Exports by 2020, we still have a long road ahead.
The segment that has the potential to play a serious role in increasing our exports is the Indian MSME. The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises are backbone and lifeline of a country’s economy and play a vital role towards achieving the aim of inclusive growth.
“We understood the value that would be generated if we helped create and execute viable business opportunities for MSMEs. This is a key factor that helps us make profits. Our success is derived from our customer’s success and that’s our marketing engine. The customers are obviously benefited directly as they don’t need to set-up export departments or recruit export managers individually nor focus on various other aspects of trading Internationally, nor do they have to waste their time exploring areas that might not yield anything worth pursuing. We rather take a partner based approach where Connect2India is merely an extension to their own business overseeing their success in global trade up until the last mile.” adds Anand Srivastava, Director Business Development
Connect2India’s integrated global trade platform makes everything required for doing export/import effectively such as market knowledge, trade intelligence, global buyers including their holistic view and trade history, various trade tools & utilities, global trade experts etc., available at a single place. With streamlined operations and having almost all export/import steps automated and self-service driven, the company is able to pass the cost advantage to its customers.
With a strong focus on unit economics, Pawan says “It is simple actually! Our Big-data driven and machine-learning enabled Integrated Global Trade Panel makes end-2-end export/import effective and efficient for our global trade experts.”
The company currently has paid customers all over India and is growing at a fast pace. For end-2-end exports, company has identified specific SME and product categories, where it could add maximum value, to focus on in the initial phase and is successfully enabling export of those products worldwide.
After proving the model successfully, Connect2India is now planning to expand its presence to major industrial cities in the next few months. In a short span of time the company has shown tremendous promise not only to the customers but also to its employees. With a strong leadership team on board, Pawan envisions Connect2India to soon stand as one of the major bridge that connects India to world and vice-versa.
The Commerce & Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu mentioned earlier this year that Government is planning a comprehensive strategy to increase the share of global trade to 40% of GDP which is expected to touch USD 5 Trillion by 2025.
“We need someone to implement and execute that strategy on the ground, partnering and hand-holding our SMEs to go global and help achieve the USD 2 Trillion global trade target. A vibrant India needs a vibrant SME sector and lets together make that happen” Pawan ends on a positive note.