SME Bank's low-interest loans to start in Q2

Under a budget of Bt15 billion, the state bank will soon offer a 4-per-cent interest rate to SME borrowers that have been badly affected by a lack of liquidity from the slowdown of the economy and to SMEs with new innovations that want to invest in their ideas.
The maximum loan is Bt15 million.
“We will try to offer these loans within the second quarter. However, we expect that more funding will be needed in the future, since this is as much as we can offer right now, and there has been a lot of interest from SME operators,” SME Bank president Supot Arevart said.
Sakchai Unchittikul, deputy secretary-general of the Federation of Thai Industries and president of the Small and Medium Industrial Institute, said Bt15 billion was not enough for this programme, but he described it as a “good pilot project” that could spur other state and commercial banks to follow suit.

‘Higher budget needed’
“I believe that another Bt50 billion is needed, since that amount would allow more SMEs to invest, and it would be large enough to stimulate the economy at the same time. This would be similar to other stimulus measures such as the government’s current investment on small job-creation and maintenance projects,” he said.
“The Bt15-billion budget should be able to help around 3,000 SME operators, at loans averaging Bt1 million to Bt5 million per operator,” he estimated.
SME Bank chairman Salinee Wangtan said the state bank was happy with its performance in the first quarter after its net profit and new loans exceeded its targets while the number of non-performing loans (NPL) continued to decrease since a new recovery plan was put into effect last year.
SME Bank reported first-quarter net profit of Bt359 million, exceeding its target of Bt300 million. Total NPLs decreased from Bt30.899 billion in February to Bt28.623 billion and accounted for 33.63 per cent of the bank’s total lending at the end of March.