During the last years, an increasing number of successful cases of using ontologies in industrial application scenarios have been reported, the majority of these cases stem from large enterprises. The intention of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of potentials and limits of ontology-based solutions in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The focus is on identifying application areas for ontologies, which motivate the development of specialised ontology construction methods. The paper is based on results from a survey performed among 113 SME in Sweden, most of them from manufacturing industries. The results of the survey indicate a need from SME in three application areas: (1) management of product configuration and variability, (2) information search and retrieval, and (3) management of project documents.