Türk Eximbank set to provide $40 bln financing in 2017, create own rating system

ISTANBUL

Turkey’s Eximbank is set to pour $40 billion in loans and insurance into more than 100,000 companies in 2017 and to launch its own rating system to measure companies’ eligibility for loans, the head of the organization has said. 

“We offered $22 billion in loans and $11 billion in insurance in 2016. We backed some 22.7 percent of Turkey’s exports last year. We plan to increase this to 26 percent over this year by offering $40 billion in loans and insurance,” said Türk Eximbank General Manager Adnan Yıldırım in a press meeting late on Feb. 15. 

He said the lender planned to reach around 100,000 companies in 2017 – 65 percent of which were composed of exporters. 

Yıldırım said some improvements in loan offers were underway. 

“We will offer loans in line with the results of our rating system. In this vein, we will make our own rating system by the end of this year,” he said, according to a follow-up press release. 

Yıldırım said 44 percent of export loans are offered by Türk Eximbank in the country through 28 different loan programs. 

“Compared to other lenders, Türk Eximbank’s lira-based loans offer an average of 6 percentage points of interest rate advantage. This is around 2-2.5 percent in foreign exchange loans. We are about to provide new advantages in the upcoming period,” he added.

According to Yıldırım, big exporters will also be able to benefit from Eximbank’s loans by presenting collaterals from the Credit Guarantee Fund (KGF), just as their smaller counterparts can. 

Yıldırım also said Türk Eximbank wanted to improve its ties with foreign eximbanks. 

Türk Eximbank already has deals with U.S. and Russian-Kyrgyz counterparts and will soon sign a cooperation deal with Italy’s Eximbank on Feb. 22, Yıldırım said. “We also plan to clinch deals with the U.K. and Belgium.”

KGF General Manager İsmet Gergerli emphasized the importance of recently announced financial support for the real sector and exporters on the road to ensuring Turkey meets its foreign exchange needs. 

“While our credit volume was 20 billion liras in the past, this figure has recently increased to 250 billion liras. We had a limited cooperation with Eximbank in the past. This has changed as well. We offered loans to small- and medium-scaled enterprises (SMEs) from our own sources in the last 25 years. However, only 11 percent of our exporters are composed of SMEs, and the remaining 89 percent are not. It was not possible for us to boost our exports only by offering financial support to SMEs. In this vein, we have all decided to offer loans to non-SMEs. We have also eased the bureaucratic procedures for all exporters,” he said, adding that the collateral applications were met in less than 24 hours. 

“We offered collaterals to 23,000 companies in the last three weeks,” added Gergerli.