Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as craft businesses can apply for grants from the new "Digital Now" funding program, with which the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy supports investments in digital technologies and employee training on digital topics.
The aim of the new programme is to promote the digitalization of business processes, develop new business models for SMEs and ensure the long-term competitiveness and innovative capacity of companies. In addition, employees are to be empowered to recognize and evaluate the opportunities of digitalization and to initiate future investments in the company.
For Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier, this is another important step towards strengthening SMEs in the digitalization process: "The coronavirus crisis has given us a digitalization boost in many areas, but of course it has also highlighted the gaps. We are therefore supporting SMEs with a further investment grant for digitalization. After all, gaps in digitalization must not become a tangible competitive disadvantage for small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition to the services offered by the 26 Mittelstand 4.0 competence centers, we are launching a new funding program called 'Digital now' and are providing grants towards investment costs if companies decide to switch to digital business processes. In this way, we want to help ensure that our companies are and remain fit for the challenges of digitalization in the long term."
The new funding program will run until the end of 2023, with a total of 203 million euros available for the program. The funding rate for investment costs is staggered according to company size. For SMEs with up to 50 employees, the funding rate is up to 50 percent, for SMEs with up to 250 employees up to 45 percent and for SMEs with up to 499 employees up to 40 percent. These high funding rates are intended to cushion the challenges of the coronavirus crisis; from July 1, 2021, the funding rates will be reduced by 10 percentage points in each case.
The funding can also increase by up to 20 percentage points on the basis of eligible bonus percentage points. Bonus percentage points are provided, for example, for investments in IT security or in structurally weak regions. The maximum funding amount is 50,000 euros per company; for investments in value creation networks, it can be up to 100,000 euros per company. The company's own contribution to the planned digitalization investment can be funded via loan and participation programmes.
