Abstract
It is customary to consider SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) as a separate category of organisations when investigating and analysing business activities. Thus any organisation with less than 250 employees is considered to be an SME while an organisation with more than 250 employees would be classified as large. This division is a convenient method of classification but it does create several problems and ignores some situations. Thus this division ignores cultural differences: for example an organisation with 250 employees would not be considered particularly large in China but would be considered very large indeed in most sub-Saharan African countries. This division also ignores sectoral differences: service industries such as retailing or catering tend to employ many people and 250 employees would be quite a small organisation in these sectors but would be very big for a specialist manufacturing company. Similarly the asset base of a company will vary greatly both according to industrial sector and according to country in which the company is based. And of course sales of €50 million is much more in some countries than in others. Nevertheless this division between SMEs and large companies has been universally adopted as a basis for investigation and analysis despite these problems.