OREANDA-NEWS. February 24, 2012. In recent years, in view of the new challenges, new requirements in the change of growth pattern and strategic economic restructuring, in the context of actions assigned to help small enterprises transform and upgrade through optimal credit allocation, top priority is given to support small enterprises in emerging sectors of high-tech, creative culture, agriculture industrialization, energy-saving and environmental protection. The aim is to boost the business portfolio and upgrade for small businesses, reported the press-centre of ICBC.

More specifically, with respect to better support small high-tech firms with "light assets" (technology and knowledge) to grow and reinforce their competitiveness, through financial innovations, ICBC embraces the latest technology to roll out trade finance services (invoice financing against account receivable and factoring) and new loan products (patented pledge loan). These ICBC services enable small high-tech firms to access bank loans despite insufficient collateral. In the Beijing Zhongguancun Science Park, ICBC Beijing Branch opened Small Business Financial Service Center under Zhongguancun Sub-branch to exclusively serve and increase the support to high-tech companies in the Park. As of today, ICBC Beijing Zhongguancun Sub-branch has disbursed over RMB 600 million in loans to small high-tech enterprises in the Park.

While stepping up the effort to support small innovative high-tech enterprises, ICBC also focuses on creative small cultural companies amid a booming creative cultural sector. From a market study carried out by ICBC, currently thousands of companies in China engaged in film and TV production are small businesses. Due to small size and poor financial position, they are facing periodic shortage of funds during the production of film and TV programs, hindering sustainable progress of good films and TV shows. To address the issue, ICBC made an innovative approach to provide supply chain finance to the creative cultural companies in order to meet the funding needs of these small enterprises. ICBC takes the broadcasting right of films and TV shows as a tradable commodity. When extending credit, ICBC allows film and TV production companies to use account receivables collected from selling the broadcasting right of their production to downstream TV stations for their loans.

Small enterprises engaged in agriculture industrialization are also a focal point of ICBC. Heilongjiang's Great Northern Wilderness is a case in point. There, the small processing companies lack funds to buy grains in season. In light of this, ICBC adopts an innovative approach to offer a commodity finance solution where grains are used as pledge for loans. In other words, borrowers pledge their unmilled grains to ICBC, ICBC then offers loans referencing the market value of the grains. To small enterprises, they can obtain funding for their business. Besides, they can use the ICBC loan to process more raw grain into finished grains, turning commodity grain into true "grain commodity". So far, ICBC is taking one step further by applying this commodity finance model of addressing funding needs of small agricultural businesses to other grain production/processing sectors in Heilongjiang. ICBC aims to contribute its share in driving the mass production of agricultural products and the coordinated development of regional economy.

In extending loans to small enterprises, ICBC strictly follows the "green credit" standard, said an executive with the Bank. ICBC consistently focuses on the innovation of "green loans" to guide small enterprises to engage in energy-saving, eco-friendly businesses. Starting from 2009, China enforced the value-added tax policy of "collect first, rebate later" on renewable energy recycling enterprises. Yet these enterprises, a majority of whom are small scale units, have part of company funds occupied while making payment for value-added tax. In view of this, ICBC rolled out domestic factoring service in Jiangxi designed for renewable energy recycling enterprises, who can borrow loans from ICBC using the account receivables from value-added tax rebate. The rebated amount is used as the source of loan payment. The new loan product is warmly welcomed by the small, energy-saving, eco-friendly enterprises. A tier-2 branch in Jiangxi's Yingtan had disbursed RMB 2.3 billion of this type of loans from 2009 to 2011. So far, there is no default since the launch of the service.