MittelstandsWiki

According to the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, USA, 93 percent of companies the server of which has been out of order for more than ten days go bankrupt within the following year. Charred interfaces, crushed read heads and destroyed drive cases represent the daily routine in the laboratory of Kroll Ontrack in the German town of Böblingen. Approximately 1000 requests for help arrive here each month by the owners of damaged hard drives. However, it might not be all that hopeless: +++

Crashes of major commercial banks in the 1970s led to the setting up of a committee for the supervision of banking in Basel, Switzerland, at the Bank for International Settlement (BIZ). This committee is made up of representatives from central banks or supervisory institutions of Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, the United States and Great Britain. The committee had identified the commercial banks´credit risk as an important factor to deal with, particularly in times of a bank crisis. The result of this awareness was the agreement on equity capital reached in 1988, better known under „Basel I”. +++

Small and medium-sized German entities (SME ⇒ Wikipedia) are calling for their own special version of the so-called International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS ⇒ Wikipedia ). This is the unanimous opinion voiced at last Wednesday´s “Internationale Rechnungslegung” conference, according to the organiser of the event, the accountancy and consultancy enterprise PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). +++

One out of five companies, according to estimates by the association Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (Bitkom), violates the rules of the Federal Data Protection Act (⇒ Wikipedia). The association therefore cautions against careless handling of customer data. Although the processing of these data has become a matter of daily routine in virtually any company, data protection imposed by law is not ensured adequately according to the association. +++

Mrs Patrizia Ribaudo, journalist with the newspaper „Die Welt�? and stock exchange expert, strongly advocates to invest in small and medium-sized companies which want to go public. Going public has become the rage and while the attention of investors is mainly drawn to the most recent protagonists of Air Berlin or Catoil, a growing number of small and medium-sized companies are gearing up for their own going public. +++

Focussing on the core business is a necessary step for many small and medium-sized companies in order to consolidate business activities, if financial recources and executive capacity are running short. Thus, many promising and sound products and services from the past are abandoned, which is a huge pitty considering the many efforts and development costs as well as motivation of staff which all seem to have been futile in such circumstances. +++

For small and medium-sized companies offering innovative high tech solutions ranging from electronics to genetic engineering products it is very difficult to keep constantly updated on the latest changes in research and development, even though the Internet often provides quite comprehensive information in particular at the initial stages of new developments. +++

Yesterday Berlin saw the launch of this year´s German Internet Award campaign. The prize which is awarded to small and medium-sized companies taking advantage of innovative information and communications technology was created in the year 2000 by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technoloy (BMWi) and will be confered for the first time this year by the Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (BITKOM). +++

Concentration on the core business, buying in of external know-how – this is the outsourcing mantra which has been repeated for many years by the providers of IT services to their major customers. Quite new, however, is the fact that this credo meets with a lot of enthusiam by small and medium-sized companies, as is reported in an article by the Austrian magazine Format. For smaller companies it was important to relieve their IT departments of daily routines and to avoid constant employee trainings, but not to outsource entire units (also see “Outsourcing of IT services pays off to small and medium-sized companies”). +++

Apart from being appealing to major enterprises, the stock exchange is increasingly accessible to small and medium-sized companies as reveals an article worth reading published in the P.T.-magazine of the Oskar-Patzelt foundation. +++