VietNamNet Bridge – The State Bank of Vietnam has been making every effort to push up lending. However, commercial banks believe that the credit growth rate would be no more than five percent by the end of the year.

The Governor of the State Bank on November 9 released an instruction on the monetary policies to be applied in the last months of 2012 and early 2013, urging commercial banks to apply “effective measures to expand credit to foster the economic development at a reasonable level.”

Le Quang Trung, Deputy General Director of VIB Bank said on Dau tu chung khoan that in fact, commercial banks now have profuse capital and they are ready to disburse money, not because of the central bank’s instruction.

VIB has been providing the credit packages with the preferential interest rates of 9.9 percent per annum for the real estate sector and 11.5 percent per annum for production and business.

Nguyen Hung, General Director of Tien Phong Bank, also said the bank has been doing everything it can to push up lending. It has checked all the loans and its clients, offered interest rate reductions, classified clients and disbursed more money to the clients, who have temporary difficulties but still can resume their business.

Though the measures have brought some initial results, Hung said the capital demand in the last months of the year would not increase sharply, because enterprises tend to be more cautious when drawing up their year-end production plan. Meanwhile, banks dare not lend money to the businesses which incur big debts and have big inventories.

Another banker also said that the disbursement of the bank’s credit package worth trillions of dong launched in September has been going very slowly.

“The problem here is that businesses cannot meet the requirements to access loans. They cannot borrow money not because banks don’t want to lend,” he said.

Also according to Trung, the ratio of outstanding loans on the mobilized capital is now between 75-85 percent (the figures vary for different banks), which means the capital redundancy of 5-15 trillion dong.

In its report about the economic situation in the last months of the year, Vietcombank Securities Company also said the loans demand would see sharp increase in the last months of the year, predicting the five percent credit growth rate for the whole year 2012.

Analysts say Vietcombank Securities has every reason to keep pessimistic about the credit growth. The commercial banks which are holding the biggest market shares all have reportedly unsatisfactory credit growth in the first nine months of the year.

Vietcombank, for example, reported the credit growth rate of 8.6 percent, Military Bank 10.7 percent, Sacombank 8.3 percent, Vietinbank 2.63 percent, Eximbank 1-2 percent. Meanwhile, Techcombank and ACB reported the minus growth rates of 3.35 percent and 0.01 percent, respectively.

If the five percent credit growth rate comes true, this would be far below the targeted level of 15-17 percent set up by the government earlier this year, and the adjusted target of 8-9 percent set up in mid-year.

Governor of the State Bank of Vietnam Nguyen Van Binh has affirmed at the ongoing National Assembly’s session that the credit growth rate could be 10 percent this year, if counting on the issued government bonds.

In 2011, the credit growth rate was 14 percent, but Vietnam could not issue government bonds.

Compiled by C. V