Abstract
The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a salient role to prosper the economic and market development in Malaysia. Among the significant contributions of SMEs are to create a lot of job opportunities, increase tax income and export duties, and improve economic stability. However, the path of SMEs’ development and growth is not a smooth sailing journey. In fact, SMEs always face a lot of problems and obstacles that are possible to influence their development, survival, and growth in the economic market. Among the major constraints encountered by SMEs are financial difficulty and lack of information. These problems that arise could be due to the entrepreneurs of SMEs not being able to establish a good relationship with their network contacts. Even though there are many past researches who had discussed about network characteristic among owner-managers, however, a study on Chinese owner-manager in Malaysia is still limited. Therefore, this paper investigates the network characteristics among Chinese owner-managers and their relationship with SMEs’ performance. The findings showed that total network size is 44 persons and network diversity is 0.16 (race), 0.37 (relationship), 0.38 (occupation), and 0.16 (gender), while the network density obtained by Chinese is 0.69. The network size of Chinese owner-managers (family members, relatives, friends, suppliers, customers, bankers, trade organization, social organization, government officials, and total network size) indicates a significant result on the overall performance.
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Kheng, L.K., Minai, M.S. (2016). The Network Characteristic of Chinese SMEs in Malaysia and Their Performance. In: Mohd Sidek, N., Ali, S., Ismail, M. (eds) Proceedings of the ASEAN Entrepreneurship Conference 2014. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0036-2_4
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