Over 35 trillion yuan in loans issued to small, micro enterprises

Banks in the first five months of 2019 issued loans to small and micro-sized enterprises with a total credit line up to 10 million yuan ($1.45 million) for each borrower at an average lending rate of 6.89 percent, falling 0.92 percentage point from the average rate of the first quarter last year.

In a press release posted on the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission website on Wednesday, the regulator said the balance of small and micro-sized enterprise loans was 35.15 trillion yuan as of the end of May.

Of the total, the balance of loans for small and micro-sized enterprises with a total credit line of up to 10 million yuan for each borrower increased by 33.46 percent from the beginning of last year to 10.25 trillion yuan.

The growth rate was 14.17 percentage points higher than that of other types of loans.

During the same period, the outstanding number of such enterprises also increased from 6.6 million to 19.28 million, according to the regulator.

As of the end of May, for small and micro-sized enterprises, the nonperforming loan ratio was 5.9 percent, which was 4.9 percentage points higher than that of large enterprises and 3.3 percentage points higher than that of medium-sized enterprises, said Zou Lan, deputy director-general of the People's Bank of China's financial market department, at a news conference on Monday.