The purpose of this paper is to discuss the difficulties of the Brazilian small and medium size companies (SMSC) to acquire the capital goods required to update their technological base. A case study comprising 15 SMSC was developed in order to collect evidences that enabled to raise the following hypothesis: the major difficulties faced by the SMSC to acquire capital goods is directly related to a series of mismanagement actions performed by their owner-managers when running their business, and not a result of lack of credit or other market / economic environment driven factor.
Small and medium size companies; capital goods; mismanagement; profits
