Posts filed under 'entrepreneurship'
Chinese Small-Business Lending Getting Smaller
In a little-noticed statement last week, China’s central bank and banking regulator gave an update on how well the country’s small businesses are doing at getting loans from banks (original in English here). That’s become a crucial issue this year, with growing concerns among officials and scholars that China’s extraordinary credit boom is bypassing the very firms that account for most new job creation. Yet the latest numbers — like many Chinese statistics – confuse as much as they enlighten.
The regulators said small- and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs for short, accounted for 14.1 trillion yuan of outstanding bank loans at the end of September, up 28% from a year earlier. Overall bank lending, by contrast, was up 34.2% in September. According to our calculations, the figures would mean small-business loans account for 36% of China’s total lending and 45% of lending to corporations. (The 3.08 trillion yuan in new loans to SMEs is also 45% of this year’s new lending to corporations.) (By Andrew Baston, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2009)
November 5, 2009
Outlook of Small Business Manufacturing Owners Fall 2009 Survey
Manufacturers Are Most Likely To Say Employee Morale Has Worsened; Retailers Have the Least Positive Outlook on the Economy Compared To Business Owners over All; Businesses in the Services Industry Are Least Likely To Take a Risk.(Manufacturing & Technology eJournal | October 21, 2009)
October 27, 2009
Multinationals Ride a Chinese Railroad Boom
As China spends vast sums to become No. 1 in rail volume and sophistication, IBM, General Electric, and Siemens are playing big roles (V. Wong, BusinessWeek, June 17, 2009).
June 26, 2009
LeapFrog Investments Raises $44 Million for Microinsurance Fund
The LeapFrog Investments Financial Inclusion Fund, the world’s first investment fund focused on microinsurance, has announced that it has raised $44 million, which it will invest in businesses that provide insurance and financial services to twenty-five million low-income people in Africa and Asia.
The fund raised the capital from public and private investors around the world, including the European Investment Bank, the Omidyar Network, the Hivos-Triodos Fund, ACCION International, and the Calvert Large Cap Growth Fund.
According to a recent Microinsurance Center report, while there are some one billion low-income people in developing countries who are willing and able to pay for a safety net to protect their family or business, fewer than 3 percent of those people currently have any kind of insurance.
“The world desperately needs market-based solutions to poverty that draw in major financial investors by offering fair but competitive returns,” said LeapFrog founder and president Andrew Kuper. “The best part about microinsurance is that we can reach millions of people, swiftly. Microinsurance is both profitable and scalable. We can think big. We don’t have to choose between money and meaning.”
Source: Philanthropy News Digest
June 23, 2009
Can the U.S. Make Vestas’ Windmills Spin?
The Danish wind turbine powerhouse is setting ambitious revenue goals, spurred in part by spending for renewables in Obama’s stimulus package (M. Scott, BusinessWeek, April 28, 2009).
May 4, 2009
PHOTO ALBUM
