Chinese financial institutions have been stepping up support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and the SMEs' borrowing needs were largely met by banks in the first half of this year, the central bank said Monday.

According to a survey by the People's Bank of China (PBOC) in August, financial institutions lent 51.7 percent of their new loans to SMEs in the first six months of the year, which satisfied 71.3 percent of their borrowing requests.

The findings of the survey, which covered 1,358 financial institutions and 2,438 SMEs located in 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, defy a widespread belief that the funding needs of Chinese SMEs are still neglected by commercial banks.

"The satisfaction ratio of small and medium-sized enterprises' borrowing requests is relatively high, and the reasons for application failures mainly lie with the borrowers themselves," the PBOC said in a press release.

The lenders said reasons for refusing to lend mainly included poor financial conditions and management of the borrowers, high risks of related projects and shaky borrower credit ratings.

The geographical allocation of loans to SMEs appears desirable, the bank said, with 62.6 percent of outstanding loans to industrial SMEs focused on East China, where 61.5 percent of SMEs' aggregate industrial value added is produced.

Bank loans have become the overwhelming source of funding for SMEs, the PBOC said.

Loans from financial institutions accounted for 98.7 percent of the SMEs' domestic financing, which is 8.4 percentage points higher than the ratio with large enterprises.

The quality of loans to SMEs is generally low, with their average non-performing loan (NPL) ratio standing at 33.4 percent at the end of June, 7 percentage points higher than the national NPL average of all financial institutions.

But the improvement has been rapid, the bank noted. The 33.4 percent NPL average was down by 17.4 percentage points compared with a year earlier.

(China Daily September 16, 2003)