Financial inclusion loans to small and micro-enterprises have seen robust, accelerating growth for the first three quarters of 2018 according to the latest official data from the People’s Bank of China.
PBOC data released on 26 October indicates that small and micro-enterprise loans saw YoY growth of 18.1% for the first three quarters, 5 percentage points ahead of the average growth rate for all forms of lending.
Small and micro-enterprise loans saw an increase of 960 billion yuan for the first three quarters, equal to around 1.6 times the volume of increase for all of 2017.
Pan Gongsheng (潘功胜), vice-head of PBOC, said some private enterprises and small and micro-enterprises had met with financing difficulties since the start of 2018, as a result of changes to external economic conditions.
PBOC has unveiled a slew of measures to deal with this issue including support tools for bond financing by private enterprise, the integrated use of several monetary policy tools to maintain ample liquidity, as well as incentivising banks to to be more active in their provision of financing to private and small and micro-enterprises.
