The Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) Development Fund Management Committee together with five local banks announced the establishment of a financial services platform yesterday in a bid to make it easier to give loans to SMEs.
“SMEs’ lack of transparency in their financial information has often made it difficult for financial institutions to evaluate loan risks. Therefore, in general, financial institutions’ willingness to give SMEs loans is low compared with loans for large enterprises,” Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥), administrative deputy minister of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), said at a press conference yesterday.
The platform will help banks simplify SME loan procedures and verify data accuracy.
“The platform can accurately reflect SMEs’ operating information for banks to verify, which will help shorten the loan process,” Jack Huang (黃新吉), president of Taiwan Business Bank (台灣中小企銀), said yesterday.
Yang Ya-hwei (楊雅惠), a policy-making member of the Financial Supervisory Commission, said that bank loans to SMEs in Taiwan increased around NT$795.4 billion (US$26.19 billion) from July 2005 to last month, with the total amount of loans reaching NT$3.16 trillion.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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