The civil engineering branch is also a significant domestic employer. The most important customers in the sector are the government and municipalities. Other typical customers are the industries, building companies and private consumers. Fenland’s national Standard Industrial Classification TOLL 2002 (Statistics Finland, 2004) categorizes enterprises, other organizations and individual enterprises into industry groups according to their principal activity. This classification is based on the European Union’s classification of economic activities, NICE 2002.
Construction is one of the main industry groups in TOLL 2002 hierarchy and it is identified with an alphabetical code “F, 45”. It is further divided into several sub-classes. In this dissertation, civil engineering consists of the following TOLL 2002 sub-classes: I) 451, site preparation ‘) 452, building of a complete construction or parts thereof; civil engineering iii)455, renting of a construction or demolition equipment with an operator Typical business in the Finnish civil engineering sector is “micro” business.
About half of all the entrepreneurs are machine drivers (excavators, caterpillars, lorries). In addition, they usually own the machines themselves (SMS, 2004). Civil engineering is a sector dominated by small firms with extended and complex supply chains. This complex and fluctuating environment has an affect to marketing. Below the ultimate purchaser of the end product, the sector is a self-contained raked. The buying and selling chain stretches down through developers, architects, consultants, main contractors, sub-contractors, earth movers, pilewort and material and equipment suppliers.
These relationships are assumed to from the base of this dissertation. This is investigated in depth in Chapter 2. 4. 1. 1. 3 Small and Medium- sized Enterprises Defining the SEEM is not an easy matter. Many definitions have been used in academic texts. The Bolton Report (1971) recognized that the size of the company should be interpreted flexibly according to industrial sector and other market environment factors. The measure of size could be e. G. Employees, turnover or market share (Heather, 2001).
In general, the small business sector is undoubtedly diverse and difficult to categories. However, according to The European Commission (AAA) and the National Technology Agency of Finland (2003), the SEEM is defined as an enterprise that employs fewer than 250 persons and has an annual turnover and/or annual balance the capital or voting rights of the small enterprise. Enterprise categories are shown in Table 1.
