Gwangju Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Recruiting Companies for Multi-Supplier Contract Consulting Support Project Participation

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Jin-hyung] The Gwangju Chamber of Commerce and Industry announced on the 28th that it will promote the ‘Public Procurement Service Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Consulting Support Project’ to support local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in entering the public procurement market and expanding their sales channels.

According to Gwangju Chamber of Commerce, this project has been implemented since 2018 with support from Gwangju Metropolitan City. Through a recruitment announcement on the Gwangju Chamber of Commerce website, 12 SMEs located in Gwangju Metropolitan City were selected and will receive customized MAS expert consulting worth 3 million KRW completely free of charge.

The Multiple Award Schedule system selects multiple suppliers to address issues such as lack of product diversity and quality degradation caused by the traditional lowest-price bidder selection method. It encourages healthy price and quality competition among suppliers while allowing demand institutions to easily purchase products through the Korea ON-line E-Procurement System (KONEPS) shopping mall without separate contract signing.

According to data from the Public Procurement Service, the public procurement market has grown into a huge market worth 175.8 trillion KRW as of 2020, accounting for 9% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is a 59.2% increase compared to 110.4 trillion KRW in 2015.

Accordingly, local SMEs are knocking on the door of the public procurement market to secure stable sales by entering this huge market, but they face difficulties entering the market due to lack of professional personnel and information.

To resolve these difficulties faced by local companies, the Gwangju Chamber of Commerce plans to strengthen a customized bidding information system that provides bidding information from major institutions nationwide including KONEPS, and through this MAS consulting support project, it will help local SMEs enter the public procurement market more easily.

The support target is manufacturing companies located in Gwangju Metropolitan City holding a direct production certificate and factory registration certificate. Twelve companies will be recruited on a first-come, first-served basis, and applications can be submitted by referring to the project announcement on the Gwangju Chamber of Commerce website.

Choi Jong-man, the full-time vice chairman, said, “Through this support project, we expect to resolve difficulties faced by companies that gave up registering products on the KONEPS shopping mall due to lack of professional personnel and consulting costs, contributing to increased sales and strengthened corporate competitiveness.” He added, “In the future, we will actively support local companies to pioneer new sales channels and leap forward by holding BtoB promotional meetings for promising companies’ products.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.