SPJIMR CFBE Report: India’s SME exporters remain optimistic amid escalating global and family business risks

The Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship (CFBE) at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, has released its Indian SME Family Business Trade Confidence and Internationalisation Report, a comprehensive study of export confidence among India’s SME family businesses.

Conducted in partnership with Hansa Research, the survey drew on 461 responses from owner-managers, directors, CEOs, and senior leaders of Indian SME family businesses actively engaged in international trade. Respondents represented 14 cities — from Ludhiana to Hyderabad and Jaipur to Kolkata — spanning every business-size category, every generational stage, and major industry, from manufacturing to trading. On average, these firms have been exporting for 16.4 years, with 82% reporting more than a decade of international trading experience.

The report is the first of its kind to deploy a four-index architecture that measures trade confidence holistically, separating forward-looking optimism from current risk burden, risk trajectory, and family governance tensions, before combining them into a single Net Trade Confidence Score (NTCS).

The 17.9-point gap between the TCI (74.3) and the NTCS (56.4) emerges as the report’s most significant finding. It quantifies a tension familiar to exporting SME family business across India: the gap between what businesses believe they can achieve and the environment in which they must operate.

Reflecting on the central paradox her research uncovered, author Tulsi Jayakumar, Executive Director – CFBE and Professor of Economics and Policy at SPJIMR, offered this assessment of what the data truly reveals: “Our data captures something that aggregate trade statistics simply cannot: the lived experience of an Indian SME exporter who is genuinely optimistic about what their business can achieve, while simultaneously navigating a risk environment that is hostile across every dimension and worsening across every trajectory. The 17.9-point gap between the TCI and the NTCS is not a rounding error; it is the quantitative expression of a structural tension that policymakers and support institutions can no longer afford to treat as background noise.”

The report’s findings carry direct implications for policymakers and institutions across India’s export support ecosystem. Prof. Jayakumar has distilled the findings into six specific policy recommendations, each with identified mechanisms, responsible parties, and measurable outcomes.

Central among these are a targeted FTA literacy and activation programme, a dedicated SME family business export finance facility to address the structural credit-access gap, and crucially, an institutional framework to support family governance in internationalization decisions, an area not currently addressed by existing export-promotion mechanisms.

The report ultimately poses a direct question to policymakers: if India’s most experienced and export-intensive SME family businesses are operating within a risk environment that is universally hostile and increasingly volatile, what corrective interventions are prepared to support them?