If the current dynamics of companies applying for loans provided through the guarantee scheme of banks and the state continues, and banks, on the other hand, manage to place money in companies’ accounts quickly enough, the Serbian economy could return to the same level by the end of the year, according to State Secretary at the Ministry of Economy, Dragan Stevanovic.
Stevanovic reminds that 80 percent of bank clients who come from the sector of micro, small and medium enterprises, and entrepreneurs, said that they were interested in using two billion euros of money that the banks provided with a state guarantee.
In Serbia, 23 banks, which account for 99.94 percent of the market share in lending to entrepreneurs, micro, small and medium enterprises, signed a guarantee scheme agreement with the state, and last week alone, banks received about 4,600 applications for this type of lending.
– If we manage to place funds efficiently, and I believe we will, we think that by the end of the year we will achieve the effect of the economy returning to the level it was before March 16 – Stevanovic estimates.
This, he adds, would fulfill the expectations regarding the projections of Serbia’s GDP growth in this and next year.
– I think that it will be in the function of achieving the projected figures in the context of GDP growth in 2020, and certainly in 2021, when we expect serious if not the highest growth at the level of the European continent – says Stevanovic.
The addresses of 23 banks in Serbia have already received the requests of the economy for loans through the guarantee scheme, and the current value of the “receivables” is around one billion euros.
– Slightly less than a billion euros is the value of the requests that arrived at the banks. I think that this will be a significant flywheel and a significant injection for liquidity and provision of working capital – the Minister says.
Businessmen have at their disposal the money that banks approve in the network of branches across the country with a state guarantee, but also loans from the Development Fund, so it is up to the companies to decide how they want to get the necessary funds.
The conditions are similar, and the difference is in the interest rate, which varies with commercial banks and depends on whether the loans are pegged to the dinar or indexed in euros.
There is great interest in loans from the guarantee scheme program, where banks have provided two billion euros in order to support the Serbian economy in order to mitigate the impact of the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, said the Secretary General of the Association of Serbian Banks (UBS) Vladimir Vasic.
– The guarantee scheme is the effort of the state to provide funds to the most vulnerable segment of our economy with the help of banks in order to overcome the problem of working capital liquidity – Vasic pointed out.
The largest number of applications for guaranteed loans, about 63 percent, are applications from micro and small enterprises.
The average amount needed by small businesses, according to UBS, is about 150,000 euros, while the average loan application in the micro-enterprise segment is about 45,000 euros.
With entrepreneurs, these requests are far lower, so they demand an average of around 25 thousand euros, Srbija Danas reports.
