Calls for proposals under the ASIA-INVEST programme

The European Commission, DG IB, has issued four calls for proposals under the ASIA-INVEST programme. This five-year programme, with a budget of ECU 45 million, is aimed at stimulating the formation of long-term business partnerships between SMEs in the EU and Asia. Three of t...

The European Commission, DG IB, has issued four calls for proposals under the ASIA-INVEST programme. This five-year programme, with a budget of ECU 45 million, is aimed at stimulating the formation of long-term business partnerships between SMEs in the EU and Asia.

Three of the calls for proposals are sub-instruments of the Business Priming Fund, which aims at providing support to groups of companies to prepare them for business cooperation. The fourth call for proposals is an instrument of ASIA-INVEST called Asia-Interprise, which offers financial and technical support for business matching events. Each operation should not last longer than two years.

- Business Priming Fund: Market Place Monitoring (Reference: No IB/AP/338)

The aim of this activity is to carry out market research and monitoring activities. These will be made available to European SMEs in the form of a sector-specific report. In this report market opportunities for European companies in Asia will be located and evaluated.

The report should include information on the legal framework, sector-specific regulations, conditions on doing business, investment and partnership opportunities. The report will also include items such as the state of the market, commercial openings, regulations relating to the market and competitor analysis.

- Business Priming Fund: Language and Business Culture Familiarization (Reference: No IB/AP/384)

Proposals must aim at helping provide groups of SMEs with the requisite language and business culture skills to conduct business in new markets or to provide them with key information on how to do business in target markets.

- Business Priming Fund: Technical Assistance (Reference: No IB/AP/391)

Proposals should aim at improving the capability of Asian companies to adapt to European technical standards and to prepare them for economic cooperation with their European counterparts.

The technical assistance given to institutions is limited to private sector organizations, and may be carried out in the companies themselves or in the form of seminars for groups of companies.

It may involve elements such as technology transfer, training of trainers and private sector institution-building. Technical assistance may involve areas such as quality control, production planning, packaging and new technologies.

- Asia-Interprise (Reference: No IB/AP/339)

Proposals should aim to promote cooperation between SMEs from the EU and Asia. The objective is to arrange meetings between the firms aimed at discussing possible cooperation projects, in order to establish partnerships. The events are expected to follow a methodology involving five different phases:

- Selection of companies
- Production of the catalogue
- Search for partners
- Business meeting days
- Evaluation.
Requests for technical documents relating to these calls, quoting the appropriate reference(s) given above, should be made in writing or by fax to the following address:

ASIA-INVEST Secretariat
17 rue Archimède
B-1000 Brussels
Fax [phone]