Small and Medium-sized Enterprise: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

A Small and Medium-sized Enterprise or SME is a company whose headcount or turnover is below certain limits.

Apparently the abbreviation SME is only common in the EU.

EU Member States traditionally had their own definition of what constitutes an SME, for example the traditional definition in Germany had a limit of 500 employees while e.g. in Belgium it could have been at 100. But nowadays the EU is standardising the concept. Its current definition categorises companies with less than 50 employees as small, those with less than 250 as medium.

Beginning with 2005, Germany will use the definition of the European Commission.

• Current Definition from the European Commission