SIDBI eyes new areas to scale up direct finance to Rs 15K cr

Micro, small and medium enterprises lender SIDBI today said it is targeting a 30-50% growth in lending aimed at scaling up direct financing to Rs 15,000 crore during the current fiscal.

This is through focusing on niche areas including equity funding, energy efficient technologies and services sector.

Besides, Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) has also planned to set up 100-125 credit facilitation centres for 400 industrial clusters in collaboration with industry associations to help them raise loans.

"We are targeting 30-50% growth in lending to these niche areas which will help our direct finance portfolio to grow to Rs 15,000 crore from Rs 11,000 crore during last fiscal," SIDBI, Deputy Managing Director, N K Maini told reporters here.

SIDBI lent Rs 700 crore for raising equity and Rs 2,700 crore each for energy efficient technologies and receivable management during 2011-12.

Maini said the small industrial sector has been facing problems in raising equity to commence new projects.
"We will try to fund them (MSME) so as to raise their equity as per their risk capital and they could also be given funds through SIDBI’s venture capital fund," he said.

SIDBI, he said, had raise resources from several international funding agencies including World Bank and Development Bank of
France to finance projects that are engaged in developing clean technologies.

Moreover, they would also get funding 75-100 basis points lower than what they usually get as per their risk weight.

In case of services sector, SIDBI will be targeting a host of services like marketing, logistics, IT services, tourism, restaurant for providing them finance, he said.

SIDBI recorded an outstanding credit outgo of Rs 53,785 crore and an overall growth of 17% in 2011-12.