Lenders shore up real economy companies

Banks provide preferential financing to foreign trade-related smaller players

China continues to ramp up support for the real economy through various means, including stabilizing foreign trade, supporting technologically advanced small and medium-sized enterprises and fostering green finance for sustainable development, experts said.

The country's banking sector also continues to consolidate its capabilities to serve the real economy－the part of a country's economy that produces actual goods and services.

In the first 11 months of 2021, new bank loans reached 19.2 trillion yuan ($3.01 trillion), which were mainly provided to sectors such as manufacturing and infrastructure construction, said Zhang Zhongning, a spokesman for the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, at a recent news conference.

As of the end of November, the outstanding balance of loans to small businesses that have a total credit line of up to 10 million yuan per borrower was 18.7 trillion yuan, up 24.1 percent year-on-year, Zhang said.

The Export-Import Bank of China has strengthened lending to foreign trade companies, boosting the country's dual-circulation development pattern that takes domestic development as the mainstay, with domestic and international development reinforcing each other. As of the end of November, its outstanding balance of loans to the foreign trade sector reached 2.39 trillion yuan, said Wu Fulin, president of the State-owned policy bank.

China Eximbank helped Chinese exporters stabilize the number of orders they receive and increased support for companies developing diversified markets overseas or participating in the Belt and Road Initiative.

It also increased funding for 158 leading companies in five key industries related to foreign trade, such as information and communications technology, pharmaceuticals and autos, and will add three more industries, including the new energy sector, to the list of major industries. So far its outstanding balance of loans to these core companies has reached about 200 billion yuan, Wu said.

The bank took multiple measures to support micro, small and medium-sized foreign trade companies.

As of the end of December, the outstanding balance of its special-purpose loans to the foreign trade sector reached 33.3 billion yuan, up 16.3 billion yuan from the beginning of last year, supporting more than 10,000 small businesses, he said.

China Construction Bank Corp, a large State-owned commercial bank, increased lending to major "new infrastructure "projects in certain areas, including 5G, big data centers, artificial intelligence, industrial internet of things and new energy vehicle charging piles. It optimized service procedures, regularly issued a list of corporate borrowers of new infrastructure loans and added clients to its high-priority lending list, said Wang Jiang, president of CCB.

In the meantime, the bank further stepped up support for technologically advanced SMEs by using big data technologies and a series of quantitative indicators to assess continuous innovation capabilities of sci-tech companies based on their intellectual property rights. It adopted different credit enhancement measures for companies with strong innovation capabilities and strong market potential, Wang said.

As of the end of November, among 4,762 national-level technologically advanced "little giant" enterprises announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, CCB had supported 854 such companies and its outstanding balance to these companies reached 24.84 billion yuan.

The bank will create a full life cycle financial service system for sci-tech companies step by step, integrating incubation and lending with investment services to help startups move from early stages to growth and expansion stages, Wang said.

China Everbright Bank Co, a national joint-stock commercial lender, also endeavored to support the development of the manufacturing industry and the private sector by allocating special-purpose lending quotas to companies in these fields, creating simplified and accelerated channels for credit approval, and offering preferential funding costs, said Fu Wanjun, president of CEB.

Preliminary statistics show that by the end of 2021, the outstanding balance of CEB's medium and long-term loans to the manufacturing industry was 137.6 billion yuan, up 46 percent from the beginning of last year.

During the same period, the outstanding balance of its loans to small businesses which have a total credit line of up to 10 million yuan per borrower surged 27 percent to 237 billion yuan.