South Korea Targets SME Growth Through Health Procurement

When selling to governments, SME’s often have challenges with matching the buying power and supply chain strength of larger organisations. For the South Korean Central Government, the pandemic has proved an opportunity to support small and medium-sized enterprises, by focusing on opportunities in the health sector through the provision of pandemic-related health supplies to international markets.

Face masks and COVID-19 self-tests created by SME’s have signed export deals worth 13 billion South Korean Won ($11 million USD), to countries including the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, through the Public Procurement Service, designed to help them enter bids with overseas procurement projects.

Of the total, nearly 6 billion SKW ($5 million USD) of export orders were received from the US public procurement market. The PPS has been working to speed up the entry of local enterprises into overseas markets to promote the country’s anti-epidemic goods and technologies.

We estimated that the global procurement market is worth $13 trillion (USD), with South Korea’s market share at 1%.

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