November 18, 2021
If you run a business in Singapore, there is a best-kept secret that will enable you to expand overseas and accelerate your revenue growth.
The government of Singapore offers a grant to help Singapore-based businesses expand into international markets. The Market Readiness Assistance (MRA) Grant is awarded to small and medium-sized businesses, and it covers up to 70% of the costs of expanding overseas. The grant is run by Enterprise Singapore, the Singapore government agency devoted to helping businesses grow.
The MRA Grant is capped at S$100,000 per company per new market, including up to S$20,000 for market promotion, S$50,000 for business development, and S$30,000 for market set-up. In each application, you need to apply for one activity in one country, and you can submit as many applications as you’d like. The maximum support period is for up to 12 months. The grant is provided as a reimbursement for costs, not a cash advance.
Applying for the MRA Grant is time-sensitive. If you want to be eligible for having up to 80% of your costs of expanding overseas covered, you’ll need to apply by March 31, 2022. And if you want to qualify for having up to 70% of your costs covered, you’ll need to apply by March 31, 2023.
To be eligible for the MRA Grant, your business needs to be incorporated in Singapore, with at least 30% of shareholders being local to Singapore. For the new market to be eligible, it needs to be a country where your business has not had more than S$100,000 in sales over each of the past three years. Your business also needs to be small or mid-size, with annual sales of less than S$100 million or with fewer than 200 employees.
The MRA Grant is a great opportunity to help your business expand into the US, and you can use the grant to directly work with partners like Alariss, which can help your business enter the US market by helping you seamlessly find and hire US business development professionals through our combined talent and global payroll platform.
You can apply for the MRA Grant through Singapore’s Business Grant Portal. You can find a step-by-step guide on how to apply for the MRA Grant here.
There are enormous opportunities for expansion into the US for Singapore tech companies. Singaporean companies already possess an edge over firms in other countries with ambitions to expand into the US: English language fluency and familiarity with the British common law regulatory environment. The US is a natural destination for ambitious Singaporean companies.
The US is a massive market, with a population of 333 million people and with many companies, both large and small. There are 7.7 million businesses in the US that have employees, which are all potential customers of B2B businesses. The US is the largest economy in the world, and US GDP is about one-quarter of world GDP.
If you run a tech company in Singapore, make sure to check out the MRA Grant, which can support your US expansion ambitions.
Alariss can help your business expand into the US. We provide local, strategic insights and build your team of top US sales and business development talent. We also make it simple to legally pay them and to manage benefits all through our Employer of Record (EOR) platform. The talent on our platform is globally-minded while fully local. You can launch in the US in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years, with just S$100,000, or basically the amount of the MRA grant! If you’re interested in hiring a US salesperson, you can sign up for our portal today.
