A swot analysis for sri lankan construction smes

Abstract

The significant benefits that Small & Medium Enterprise (SME)s provide to the national economy, including their contributions to the economic development, industrial output, employment creation, and tax revenue marked as the reasons for examining the various aspects of SMEs around the world. The construction industry is usually described as being one of the riskiest business arenas and hence, SMEs needs to improve their capacities by analysing the possible opportunities as well as the threats in the market to sustain in the construction industry. Hence, this paper explored the SWOT analysis for SME contractors in Sri Lanka. A literature review followed by five case studies were carried out to collect data. The collected data were analysed and presented in a SWOT matrix to identify the advantage of positive facts over negative facts for construction SMEs. As per the research findings, the explored external and internal factors can be categorised under five main themes as financial, technical, managerial, legal and political and other. Findings of the case studies identified 21 internal factors as the strengths of construction SMEs and 48 internal factors as weaknesses of construction SMEs. Yet, the study further revealed 22 factors under opportunities for construction SMEs and identified 46 external factors as threats to their organisation. This study further proves that a detailed understanding of the processes and extensive explorations of all possible causes, reasons using the SWOT analysis will help overcoming the number of challenges faced by construction SMEs. In addition, it was evident that inexpensive or zero cost solutions could be implemented by identifying the strengths and opportunities of their organisations. This will mark for further researches to study the possible strategies for construction SMEs using SWOT analysis matrix.