OREANDA-NEWS. August 24, 2011. Since January this year, ICBC embarks on a "green credit" program while keeping the accelerated financial support to small enterprises. By ensuring optimal credit deployment, the Bank lends intensive support to small enterprises with keen action in energy-saving and environmental protection. Among all the small business customers of ICBC as of today, 99.6% of them are eco-friendly or pass the eco-standard certification. ICBC "green loans" help small enterprises keep transformation and upgrade on track and set its course for sustainable development, reported the press-centre of ICBC.

ICBC works on two fronts in the offering of products and services to small enterprises, said an executive with the Bank. First is to strictly enforce the "one-vote veto" criteria in extending "green loan". The other focus is to capitalize the market opportunity advocating environmental protection, energy-saving, emission reduction to increase "green supply", and extend more loans to the emerging energy-saving & eco-friendly companies in the market. By establishing closer connection with the State and regional environmental protection authorities, ICBC has set up a "green channel" to solicit information and understand the rules of entering the market of environmental protection industry and collect the list of small enterprises engaged in the sector. Special effort has been spent in pursuing these small eco-friendly enterprises with tangible results.

Environmental protection, energy-saving equipment is one sector supported by the State. In this connection,ICBC has provided great support to the small environmental/energy saving manufacturers of good market potential. In Ningbo, Ningbo Aike Instruments Co., Ltd ("Aike") is a small enterprise established in 2009. Main products of the Company are electromagnetic heat meter, intelligent electromagnetic flowmeter, in line with the State's reform of energy-saving, emission-reduction and heat supply system. Due to the huge demand in the market, in 2010 Aike decided to expand production but hampered by capital shortage. When hearing the situation, ICBC Ningbo Branch saw the good potential of Aike's products and took the initiative to talk with Aike. In the end, ICBC extended an "Online Loan Link" loan of RMB 1.5 million to Aike. The ICBC loan not only addressed Aike's immediate need of working capital, but helped Aike save considerable financial cost through reasonable liquidity arrangement.

Meanwhile, ICBC also steps up innovation on the "green loan" products to small enterprises. 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 them are small scale units, have considerable 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 loan from ICBC using the accounts receivables from value-added tax rebate.

The rebated amount is used as the source of loan payment. "An ICBC branch in Yingtan has disbursed RMB 2.3 billion of this type of loan from 2009 to 2011", said an executive with ICBC Jiangxi Branch, "So far, no default since the launch of the service".
Besides spending efforts on loan products to meet the specific requirements of small eco-friendly enterprises, ICBC also looks for best delivery of services to customers in the energy-saving, environmental protection sector in line with their business characteristics. A basket of financial services covering settlement, investment banking, guarantee, wealth management, corporate annuity, electronic banking, bank card has been designed and warmly received by the small business customers.