Small and medium enterprises
type of business
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by many national agencies and international organizations, such as the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In any given national economy, SMEs outnumber large companies by a wide margin and also employ many more people. On a global scale, SMEs make up 90% of all companies and account for more than 50% of all employment. For example, in the EU, 99% of all businesses are SMEs. Australian SMEs makeup 98% of all Australian businesses, produce one-third of the total gross domestic product (GDP), and employ 4.7 million people. In Chile, in the 2014 commercial year, 98.5% of firms were classified as SMEs. In Tunisia, self-employed workers alone account for about 28% of total non-farm employment, and firms with fewer than 100 employees account for about 62% of total employment. U.S. SMEs generate half of all U.S. jobs, but only 40% of the GDP.
Developing countries tend to have a higher proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises. SMEs are also responsible for driving innovation and competition in many economic sectors.
“Small and medium enterprises” enters the record as type of business. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Small, medium and enterprises can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Small and medium enterprises” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Small, medium and enterprises provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q622439. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Small and medium enterprises” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.