52 MEET THE BUYER
Minority Supplier Development UK( MSDUK) is preparing for its busiest year to date with an ambitious schedule of events for ethnic minority owned businesses( EMBs) and corporate members alike.
MSDUK Prepares for it’ s biggest year yet
MSDUK hosted their biggest, and most successful, event to date last November at the British Library and Conference Centre.
Over 70 ethnic minority business owners met with commodity buyers from Marriott Hotels, ExxonMobil, Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Capital One, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Dell, IBM, Pfizer and Cisco to take part in interactive workshops. 46 of those EMBs then had one-to-one meetings with senior buyers.
Explains Mayank Shah, MSDUK’ s director business development:“ By focusing on specific commodity areas identified by our corporate members, we attracted business owners from ten different business sectors, a record for this type of event.“ For the first time, we introduced supplier presentations which enabled a number of our EMB members to present their organisations to corporate members and their fellow ethnic minority business owners to add another dimension to our tried and tested‘ Meet the Buyer’ networking format.”
The MSDUK team also took the opportunity to gather information for future events and asked minority businesses what types of training would benefit their development. 48 per cent cited training to assist with managing the engage | uk ISSUE SIX 2008