Q&A: What the year has in store

Ondrej Frydrych, chief executive officer of Home Credit Group in China.

A1 We are quite optimistic about China's economic prospect and believe the country's stable economic growth will remain a major driving force of the world's economic growth momentum.

China has made remarkable progress in the marketization of interest rates, the internationalization of renminbi and urbanization, and is now putting great efforts to deepen its economic transformation from investment-driven to a consumption-driven one. In the context of "new normal", the smooth transformation will not only benefit China itself, but also will be conducive to the world economy.

A2 China's 13th Five-Year Plan stresses a deep integration of technology and economy, and in the context of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, a lot of new industries and business models have been fostered, with many coming from the finance industry.

One important innovation coming from Home Credit's business model is that we have developed into a highly-efficient business that captures lending relationships through our extensive multichannel distribution network, which consists of over 140,000 point-of-sales outlets cooperated with the leading electronics retailers, supermarkets and cell phone chains in China.

A3 Thanks to the Chinese government's efforts to further open up the country's consumer finance market, Home Credit has achieved a high-speed growth in China in 2016, and has more than 60,300 employees and set 140,000 points-of-sales outlets across the country by the year end.

In 2017, we are confident in continuing the momentum by putting more focus on optimizing our products and services to improve customer experience and deepening our business deployment. We expect to stably extend our network of more than 200,000 points-of-sales outlet with more than 20 million active clients by the end of 2017.

A4 We see the optimistic side of this situation. The internationalization of renminbi is conducive to reducing the exchange rate risk and promoting the development of China's international trade and investment, which will provide a larger arena where Chinese companies can play greater roles and seek to "go global".As a long-term partner of many Chinese companies, Home Credit is more than willing to strengthen our collaboration with them and share our best practice in global market, so as to help our Chinese partners to explore the overseas markets.

A5 Absolutely YES. Home Credit will continue our commitment to China market, by further supporting the country's efforts to drive financial inclusion and boost consumption. We plan to invest up to 6 billion yuan in China in next two years combined to support the sustainable and solid development of our business. In October 2016, we have issued more than 1.3 billion yuan of asset-backed securities in China for the purpose of diversifying our financing channels with lower costs to provide more inclusive consumer finance services to customers. In the coming year, we are planning to issue our first financial bonds in China to further reduce the financing costs.