Business Answers

[#1]

Britain’s small businesses grew by an average of 11 per cent over the last six months, up five per cent on the last half year according to HP’sSMB Index, an independent survey of 1000 UK small businesses (between 1 and 50 employees).

HP’s third SMB Index paints a slightly more optimistic picture for the UK economy – which relies heavily on growth in the SMB sector – than the last study in July 2011, with 63 per cent of respondents reporting that their business will grow in the next six months, at an average of 14 per cent.

Some other interesting insights:

• Half of SMEs use social media, and nearly three-quarters of them have generated leads or revenue from it. (Good for them. We're big fans of social media marketing.)
• They're making laptop purchase decisions based on processor power, price and hard drive space; less so because of business features like portability, security and reliability. (Tut tut but perhaps understandable if they're spending their own money or not particularly technical)
• The other side of this coin is that nearly half would put off buying a new work laptop if it couldn't play games, movies or music. (Fair enough and most business notebooks should do all these things if you want them to.)

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