China’s Central Bank announced in the policy briefing that remarkable progress has been made in reducing financial costs for small and micro firms. 

The People's Bank of China claimed credit access for small firms was eased in the first seven months of the year with loans issued amounting to over 600 billion yuan, which is a sharp increase of more than 400 billion yuan compared with the same period of last year. The loan balance at the end of July was 7.38 trillion yuan, up over 15 percent year-on-year, and six percentage points higher than that in December 2017. Meanwhile, the average lending rate for small firms stood at 6.41 percent for July.

As China’s small and micro businesses play an increasingly important part in the economy, Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said that the PBOC is committed to laying out more steps to support the development of companies.

“We will continue to strengthen the guiding function of monetary policies and adopt credit policies to support re-lending and discounts for small firms. We will also guide financial institutions toward providing increasing support and cutting required reserve ratios in financing small businesses, within the bank’s macro-prudential assessment framework,” noted Zhu.