- Kit Digital, program of the Recovery Plan managed by Red.es, has distributed around 35 million euros in aid to Basque companies with fewer than 50 workers in its three open calls
- Red.es opens an SME Accelerator Office in Ermua to accelerate digital transformation
- Denis Itxaso: “Digitalization is synonymous with success and its great potential will allow SMEs to increase their productivity between 15% and 25% in the coming years”
Around 5,300 Basque SMEs have already benefited from the aid provided by the Digital Kit program, an initiative of the Government of Spain, managed by Red.es, a public entity attached to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. Red.es has a budget of 3,067 million euros to promote the digitization of small businesses, microenterprises and self-employed workers and contribute to modernizing the productive fabric. These 5,300 digital bonds granted to Basque companies with less than 50 workers through bonds of 12,000, 6,000 or 2,000 euros depending on the size of the company, means that 35 million euros of European funds have reached SMEs and self-employed people in the autonomous community to implement basic digitization solutions. This was pointed out by the Government Delegate in the Basque Country, Denis Itxaso, during the inauguration of an Office for Accelerating SMEs, in the Biscayan town of Ermua. Along with the delegate, the mayor of Ermua, Juan Carlos Abascal; the director of Gaia (cluster of Knowledge Industries and Technology of the Basque Country), Tomás Iriondo, and the deputy director of Digital Economy of Red.es, José Ignacio Sánchez, also participated in the event.
During his speech, Itxaso stressed that “digitalization is a synonym of success and its great potential will allow SMEs to increase their productivity between 15% and 25% in the coming years. It is absolutely necessary that the Public Administrations help the SMEs to speed up their digitalization process. The Acelera SME office that we are opening today will help us to achieve solid and reliable information systems that provide professionals with a clear vision of the operational aspects of the activity, which will make it possible to speed up decision-making and adapt it to the company’s strategy.”
The purpose of the office like the one that has just been opened in Ermua and that belongs to Red.es (will be managed by Gaia) is to provide support to SMEs with a vocation of digitalization for the incorporation of technologies in their business models, and to those others of a technological nature that demand support to position themselves in the market. The Kit Digital program, funded by the European Union through the Next Generation EU funds, within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the Spain Digital 2026 agenda and the Digitalization Plan for SMEs 2021-2025, will drive this transformation.
Itxaso has emphasized that digitalization, which is not yet the majority among SMEs, “is going to be a comparative advantage for those who do bet on doing so. They will open their showcase to a potential audience they didn’t even imagine. They will grow more and better. They’ll be able to analyze their competitors so they don’t lag behind and tackle simpler and more effective marketing actions.”
And he recalled that the Government wanted to take advantage of Next Generation funds to deploy digital transformation through leverage policies. “From the urban agenda to education, from agriculture to tourism, from industry to mobility, from the modernization of public administration to the new care economy.”