Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for having me here today.
My name is Guy Jobin, and I am the vice-president of Business Services with the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal.
The Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal is the voice of the business community. Representing over 7,000 members, it offers activities and services to accelerate the development of SMEs here and abroad. It organizes over 200 activities a year, including some 40 international trade activities that are truly dedicated to SMEs to help them to penetrate international markets.
Among the services offered, we have the trade accelerator program, or TAP, which is also available across Canada. The program exists to help SMEs that export little, or nothing at all, to develop an export plan. We organize cohorts of up to 20 businesses. Over a period of six to eight weeks, people receive professional coaching and training on how to design their export plan, and then design it. At the end, after eight weeks, they will all have an export plan adapted to their business. We currently have four cohorts a year under this program, and we expect to have 12 in Quebec next year.
We also organize 20 training workshops on the ABCs of international trade. These are short three-hour training workshops designed to help entrepreneurs to understand certain subjects, including letters of credit and incoterms. These workshops are divided into small groups of 20 people maximum. So there is good interaction between trainers and participants.
We also offer 12 seminars on business opportunities. These seminars began about 18 years ago, when 80% to 83% of Quebec exports were focused on American markets. We thought that businesses should diversify, and we decided to present one market a month to entrepreneurs. I would say that these seminars operate on the same principle almost all the time. They last three hours. In the first two hours, we provide information on the market, business potential and how to do business in a market. Then, in the second part, Quebec businesses already on that market come to talk about their experience, successes and failures. It works very well and draws an average of 40 to 50 participants per session. We just had one on Japan. We really gave all the information about that country, that is, about business opportunities, and we then had a group of businesses with us. People like knowing a little more and having the perspective of a business that has had first-hand experience.
Lastly, we organize about a 10 trade missions a year to markets in the United States, and elsewhere as well. We have just returned from France, where we attended the Paris Fintech Forum with the Finance Montréal cluster. We also went to Singapore and are returning to Japan for the second time this year on the topic of artificial intelligence.
That's a summary of everything the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal does in international trade. We work extensively with partners such as Global Affairs Canada, Export and Development Canada, clusters and other organizations. We work together to offer these activities.
Thank you.