Emerging Markets Global Advisory LLP (EMGA), in partnership with Banco Improsa, announces that it has secured a US$15 million line of credit from The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

EMGA’s Head of Investment Banking and Managing Director of EMGA, Sajeev Chakkalakal, stated: “In spite of a challenging global macroeconomic environment, we are pleased to once again facilitate Banco Improsa’s continued vision to supporting SMEs in Costa Rica and complete this financing solution.”

Commenting on the transaction, Felix Alpizar Lobo, General Manager of Banco Improsa, said: “This financing reaffirms our commitment to strengthening the SME segment in Costa Rica. Banco Improsa is proud to share JICA’s objective of contributing to the economic and social growth of developing countries.”

EMGA’s Managing Director Jeremy Dobson added: “Banco Improsa’s strong management and healthy financial position were key factors in helping the EMGA Investment Banking team secure this funding, and this JICA facility will further strengthen Banco Improsa’s ability to grow its core SME lending book.”

JICA

The Japan International Cooperation Agency is a governmental agency that provides most of the Official Development Assistance for the Government of Japan. It is chartered with assisting the economic and social growth of developing countries, and the promotion international cooperation.

EMERGING MARKETS GLOBAL ADVISORY LLP (EMGA)

EMGA, with offices in London and New York, assists financial institutions and corporations seeking new debt or equity capital. EMGA’s multi-national team combine the decades of experience necessary to complete transactions on behalf of their clients within the world’s emerging markets and frontier economies, including Costa Rica which remains a key market. With a proven track record in capital formation and strategic advisory throughout diverse economic cycles, EMGA continues expanding its geographic reach and service offering, solidifying its place in the market as one of the industries pre-eminent emerging markets focused niche investment banks.

BANCO IMPROSA

It is a commercial bank with more than 37 years of experience, whose relational business model and focus on niche markets specializes in providing financing solutions and services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), among others. Banco Improsa was one of the first private banks in Costa Rica to offer non-financial services to its clients and has a long-standing history of providing advice and support to SMEs. Banco Improsa’s key success factor is its commitment to high standards of agile and flexible service, which, together with the offer of customized financial solutions, has enabled it to achieve a solid position in these segments.

Banco Improsa is a subsidiary of Grupo Financiero Improsa (GFI).

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• Hexagon has contributed significantly to the open-source Fluid Framework data architecture that connects any manufacturing system and will integrate with Microsoft 365 creating agile, simplified workflows and productive collaboration using engineering and productivity software
• Hexagon will roll-out applications that integrate the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to empower experienced employees to be more productive and assist less skilled users
• These innovations form a significant foundation for new real-time co-engineering applications that combine Hexagon’s digital twin technologies with Microsoft Azure

HANNOVER, Germany, April 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division today announces its strategic partnership with Microsoft, which aims to redefine how engineers collaborate and enable the discrete manufacturing industry to innovate faster, with more confidence, and with new solutions that combine data from virtual engineering processes with real-world measurement of manufactured products. The collaboration will offer solutions that use modern cloud infrastructure to connect manufacturing and engineering systems – including Microsoft 365 – in Hexagon’s Nexus digital reality platform for manufacturers, and help employees increase their productivity through cloud-accelerated simulation and AI. 

The partnership aims to transform collaboration across the manufacturing value chain and apply digital twins to accelerate product innovation.

Transforming how manufacturers collaborate

Hexagon and Microsoft have partnered closely on the development and scaling of the open-source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to support the real-time sharing of data across a wide range of manufacturing industry processes and systems, allowing data created in one system to be immediately available to any other person or machine operating in another. Under the new partnership, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem will plug into this data layer, enabling customers to connect their day-to-day office documents and processes with manufacturing tools. This gives teams the freedom to innovate with the tools they already use; for example, tooling cost data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet could be easily shared with a CAM programmer, so simplifying work practices and decision-making between roles.

Microsoft Teams calls can become interactive working sessions, with CAD, simulations or metrology point clouds seamlessly visualised from the source data to allow on-the-spot collaboration and fast, iterative teamwork across disparate engineering and manufacturing functions. Hexagon has already demonstrated this capability in its 3D Whiteboard Nexus tool, which is also now available as an native app in Teams.

Accelerating innovation through AI and high-performance computing

Hexagon is working with Microsoft to integrate generative AI models into its manufacturing software, helping users to make better use of their capabilities and analysing existing datasets to learn and suggest the best practices for achieving desired outputs. These AI experiences include contextual advisors, offering expert users productivity-boosting automation while also helping new users to upskill faster and achieve good results with less supervision – a valuable tool as the industry faces a growing skills shortage in many essential roles.

The partnership will apply Hexagon’s manufacturing, engineering and data science domain expertise and Microsoft Azure’s elastic computing and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to accelerate engineering simulations by up to three orders of magnitude, making it possible to streamline design & engineering workflows to deliver innovative products to market at greater speed. Hexagon’s machine learning technology optimizes heavy-load simulations, allowing them to run much more efficiently. Azure customers will be able to use their existing contracts to access this machine learning-accelerated compute service through Nexus – allowing teams to use the IT they already have in place.

Combining Hexagon’s measurement and reality capture technology and Nexus open-access

 platform with Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem creates the foundation for agile and collaborative engineering applications and industrial metaverse use cases. A digital twin utilising Azure compute for simulations can now draw Hexagon’s real-world, real-time data capture and present information to users without complex systems integration. By implementing these technologies, manufacturers can create new workflows across the product lifecycle that shorten time to market, improve factory-floor efficiencies, identify manufacturing problems in real-time and improve quality.

Stephen Graham, EVP and General Manager Nexus at Hexagon said: “At Hexagon, we’re on a mission to empower the workforce by presenting them with the best available information as soon as possible and helping them to close the gap between their optimal-performance virtual designs and the physical products that they manufacture. We have achieved a huge amount with Microsoft in a few short months by collaborating closely and applying their best cloud technologies to unlock new ways of collaborating and sharing data.

Our strategic partnership takes this to the next level, driving a shared vison and go-to-market to help our customers connect their Hexagon tools and products with third-party engineering systems and Microsoft 365. This allows for completely new workflows to be built, increasing the visibility of data, enabling sustainable innovation and increasing productivity from design & engineering to end-of-life management.”

Aleš Holeček, Corporate Vice President Office Product Group, at Microsoft said: “Microsoft’s collaboration with Hexagon is driven by a shared belief that the future of work and productivity is grounded in collaboration. Similar to how Microsoft applied the Fluid Framework to our own Microsoft 365 applications, Hexagon has extended that same open-source data fabric to manufacturing problems, enabling real-time collaboration between the many engineering disciplines it takes to make a great product, through its Nexus platform running on Microsoft Azure. It’s something that will push the boundaries for workplace collaboration for both of our platforms as we connect productivity with the engineering and operational technologies ‘makers’ need to be productive today.”

Learn more about Nexus at https://hexagon.com/products/product-groups/nexus

Media contacts:
Robin Wolstenholme
Global Media Relations and Analyst Relations Manager
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence Division
Phone: +44(0)7407 642190
e-mail: [email protected]
Global press office: [email protected]

About Hexagon

Hexagon is the global leader in digital reality solutions, combining sensor, software and autonomous technologies. We are putting data to work to boost efficiency, productivity, quality and safety across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, public sector, and mobility applications. 

Our technologies are shaping production and people related ecosystems to become increasingly connected and autonomous – ensuring a scalable, sustainable future. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division provides solutions that use data from design and engineering, production and metrology to make manufacturing smarter. For more information, visit hexagon.com/mi.

Hexagon (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B) has approximately 24,500 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately 5.4bn EUR. Learn more at hexagon.com and follow us @HexagonAB.

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73 percent lack confidence in their marketing strategies, and 81 percent are nervous the current economy could negatively impact their business.

WALTHAM, Mass., April 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Constant Contact, a digital marketing and automation platform that has helped millions of small businesses and nonprofits globally, issued its latest Small Business Now report. Featuring insights from over 1,300 small businesses in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, the findings reveal most small businesses struggle to market themselves effectively due to low confidence, time constraints, and insufficient marketing knowledge.

With more than 300 million small businesses (SMBs) in the world, marketing is essential for differentiation and conveying value to customers. However, Constant Contact’s Small Business Now report reveals a concerning trend — many small businesses feel overwhelmed by marketing, and they are not confident that their current strategy is contributing to their business goals. Uncertainty about the best methods for communicating with customers and a lack of time to execute campaigns fuel a cycle of procrastination that prevents small businesses from reaching their potential.

“Small business owners are usually much more passionate about their products and services than they are about marketing, but they still need to attract and retain customers to grow,” said Sarah Jordan, chief marketing officer at Constant Contact. “Our research shows that while most SMBs recognize the importance of marketing, they often lack the time and expertise to be effective, especially in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Constant Contact is committed to providing easy, yet powerful, tools that automate marketing to help our customers achieve better results in less time.”

Confidence is Low, Driven in Part by Economic Concerns

The economy is a bigger concern than in 2023, and small businesses aren’t sure their marketing is effective. To account for that uncertainty and keep up, they expect to spend more time and resources on marketing this year.

• 81 percent of SMBs surveyed are concerned the current economy could negatively impact their business.
• Small businesses in the UK report the highest level of concern about the economy (32 percent are very concerned) compared to other countries polled.
• 73 percent of small businesses surveyed show a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of their marketing strategy.
• 39 percent of SMBs surveyed plan to increase their marketing budgets this year, and 46% expect to spend at least 10% more.

There Isn’t Enough Time to Prioritize Marketing

The daily responsibilities of small businesses often overshadow marketing efforts. When they do find the time, they say it takes too long, which leads them to procrastinate on the things that could make a big impact.

• 56 percent of SMBs surveyed say they only have an hour or less each day to spend on marketing, and 34 percent feel marketing more efficiently is an area of opportunity.
• Small businesses in Canada report the least time available for marketing of any country polled.
• 52 percent routinely put off marketing in favor of other activities, with Australian SMBs the most likely to procrastinate. Comparatively, their counterparts in the U.S. are least likely to put off marketing tasks.
• The most time-consuming marketing tasks are posting on social media (51 percent), planning and strategy (40 percent) and determining what’s working (35 percent). Those are also the areas small businesses are most likely to avoid.

Knowledge Gaps Prevent Growth

Small businesses understand that they need to acquire customers, but they aren’t sure which marketing channels to leverage, what strategy works best, or how to improve their campaigns.

• The top marketing challenges facing SMBs are acquiring new customers (60 percent), understanding what’s working (33 percent), and lack of resources (32 percent)
• When asked how to improve ‌their marketing this year, 37 percent of SMBs surveyed said using the right channels is their biggest area of opportunity. In fact, 41 percent plan to increase the number of marketing channels they use in 2024.
• 82 percent agree that using multiple marketing channels leads to better results, but just 16 percent are confident that they are using the correct channels to reach their customers.
• Australian SMBs cite lack of knowledge as the biggest obstacle preventing them from using more than one marketing channel.

To learn more about the findings from Constant Contact’s Small Business Now, download the report.

Study Methodology:
Constant Contact‘s Small Business Now report analyzes insights from over 1,300 small business decision-makers at the Director level and above at companies with under 250 employees. Polls were conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States and aggregated to determine global trends. All stats are representative of their associated demographics. The survey was conducted by Ascend2 in February 2024.

About Constant Contact
Constant Contact delivers everything small businesses and nonprofits need to build, grow and succeed. With powerful online marketing tools, contact management, sales features, and innovative AI capabilities, Constant Contact makes it easy to attract the right people, engage more customers, close more deals and grow.

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