OREANDA-NEWS. March 28, 2013. In China, during the last few years, greater efforts have been made to promote industrial restructuring and upgrade, and SMEs show strong intention to buy new types of machinery equipment for technology upgrade and production expansion. In view of this, ICBC leverages its wide service network and domain expertise of ICBC Leasing (a wholly-owned subsidiary of ICBC) to offer equipment leasing services for SMEs to speed up transformation and upgrade with the use of new technologies, processes and equipment.

 As of today, ICBC has disbursed over RMB 7.5 billion to help 304 SMEs in 73 tier-2 cities in 17 provinces/regions have new equipment through leasing. The lessees are SMEs engaged in 10+ industry sectors encompassing construction, textile, machinery manufacturing, printing, packaging and food.

The SME equipment leasing is a service in which the leasing company buys the equipment from suppliers stated by the SMEs or directly buys the equipment owned by the SMEs, and then rents the equipment to the SMEs as agreed in the contract. The equipment leasing is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses to secure working capital for buying advanced equipment to upgrade technology. Now, ICBC’s equipment leasing service is better known for its star product "Easy Rental Link", the first such service in China that combines leasing product and bank loan and also the first leasing product designed for SMEs with registered trade mark. "Easy Rental Link" has already displayed its significant role in addressing the difficulty of SMEs to access bank loan.

ICBC Leasing takes full advantage of ICBC Group’s vast outlet network and customer managers nationwide to reach SME customers, who are located in different regions in China. Small and medium-sized companies, if they wish to lease equipment, they can submit application to local ICBC branch instead of calling up ICBC Leasing in Beijing. Once checked and referred by the local ICBC branch, ICBC Leasing approves the application and buys the equipment, then rents the equipment to the company (lessee) as agreed in the contract.

The lessee pays rent to ICBC Leasing as agreed. So far, the service brings together the professional expertise of ICBC Leasing and the fast, convenient ICBC service channels. Small-and-medium enterprises warmly welcome this service which is a solution for them to get working capital for their fixed asset investment.

In the past, ICBC Leasing only offered leasing services on limited types of equipment such as textile printing machines, medical instruments, numerically controlled machine tools. In order to better support the technology upgrade of SMEs, ICBC embraces innovation to allow other types of equipment with high adaptability, stable market prices and value for leasing, offering more choices to SMEs, an executive at ICBC said. Meanwhile, ICBC Leasing also works with large modern equipment manufacturers, who provide guarantee and facilitate SMEs to buy their manufactured equipment (machineries, machine tools, printing machines) through financial leasing. Worthy of note is that, ICBC Leasing also takes into consideration the actual problem of SMEs when offering equipment leasing service. Flexible options for rental payment are offered to relieve their repayment and financial burden.