Bank loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) rose NT$56.2 billion (US$1.79 billion) in November last year, the third-highest increase of the year, data compiled by the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) showed yesterday.
As of November, aggregated SME loans totaled NT$9.69 trillion, accounting for 65.15 percent of all bank-issued corporate loans, with a 0.24 percent nonperforming loan ratio, flat from a month earlier, commission data showed.
In the first 11 months of last year, banks boosted SME loans by NT$406.4 billion, exceeding the commission’s NT$380 billion goal by nearly 7 percent, it said.
Photo: An Rong Xu, Bloomberg
The annual increase in SME loans met the commission’s target every year for the past 16 years, except for during the 2008 global financial crisis, commission data showed.
Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank (台北富邦銀行) recorded the largest increase in SME loans during the 11 months at NT$74.9 billion, mainly due to the bank’s merger with Jih Sun International Bank (日盛銀行) in April, which allowed it to add NT$31.5 billion of Jih Sun’s lending to its SME loan book.
After Taipei Fubon, Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行), Chang Hwa Commercial Bank (彰化銀行), E. Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) and Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) also recorded sizeable expansions, adding about NT$56.05 billion, NT$46.62 billion, NT$43.21 billion and NT$34.08 billion to their SME loan book during the January-to-November period respectively, the commission said.
In related news, the nation’s credit card spending in the first 11 months of last year rose 21.66 percent annually to a record NT$3.84 trillion, exceeding the full-year level of NT$3.49 trillion in 2022, commission data showed last week.
As of November, the number of credit cards in circulation in Taiwan totaled 57.96 million, an increase of 170,000 from the previous month, with the ratio of effective cards standing at 64.94 percent, up 0.26 percentage points from a month earlier, the data showed.
Total credit card spending for last year is projected to exceed the NT$4 trillion mark, the commission said.
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