The Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) and the Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO) have agreed to jointly promote business ties between the Indian and Japanese small and medium enterprises (SMEs), informed FIEO official Wednesday.

"SMEs are the one who are more aggressive for partnership concern or the proprietorship concern...so they have the potential but they don't know how to do business in Japan. That's why FIEO along with JETRO come forward to help them," Vice President, FIEO, Amit Goyal told SME Times on the sidelines of a seminar on Emerging Business Opportunities under Indo-Japan Economic Partnership, jointly organised by FIEO and JETRO in New Delhi.

"Our emphasis is on the SME sector because 70 percent of our members are SME. The big players like Tata or Reliance, don't need a handholding. They have their own marketing team, research team and they know everything. But SME sector wants support. So our focus is going to be only on the SME sector," he added.

FIEO in association with JETRO is organizing a three prong strategy to help SMEs of the two nations. "One is having aggressive seminars in metros, plus two tier cities. Second is to have exchange of delegation. We will take the SME delegation to Japan and exchange their delegation and then have B2B meeting with them. And the third would be to participate in their leading exhibition and invite their exhibitors to come to India in the various exhibitions that we are having here," said Goyal.

Speaking at the occasion, Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry G H Bambawale said that huge business opportunities exists in both the countries to enhance economic relations.

Japan is one of India's main trading partners and offers vast potential and business opportunities for trade and investment between the two countries in goods and services.

These opportunities have further increased after the signing of CEPA in Feb 2011. India is also emerging as a favoured destination in Asia for Japanese FDI. There has been increasing trend in FDI in recent times, especially in automobile industry, electronic equipments, telecommunication sector etc.

During April 2000 and March 2013, India has received USD 14.55 billion FDI from Japan. Since 2002, bilateral commerce between the countries have increased by six times. Currently it stood at USD 18.77 billion, Tamaki Tsukada, Minister (Economic), Embassy of Japan in India said in his address to seminar.

These types of seminars will focus on the business opportunities in goods and services between the two countries.

When asked, how many Indian SMEs will be benefited with this exercise, Goyal said, "In FIEO we have about 17,000 members and if I say about 60 percent of them are SMEs. That means we are talking about close to 10,000-11,000 SMEs."

"I would say out of this I am able to convert even only 10 percent of my member, which is about 1000 members, I would have achieve a major task," he added.