Business Desk :
Credit flow to the industrial sector witnessed a 22% jump year-on-year in FY22, thanks to high import costs and rising dollar prices.
In the last fiscal, banks and non-bank financial institutions disbursed Tk481,517 crore in loans to the sector, which was Tk374,719 crore in FY21, according to Bangladesh Bank’s recent industrial quarterly report.
Bankers linked this healthy credit growth to imports of capital machinery and other goods at higher costs because of soaring global prices and continuous gain of dollars against taka.
The lending rate is still capped at 9% for banks although the central bank has raised the repurchase agreement (repo) rate to 5.5% to control inflation.
That is why customers are availing bank loans at lower rates, leading to a rise in disbursements to the industrial sector, they said.
The central bank report shows that in the second quarter (April-June) of this year, disbursements to the CMSME sector stood at Tk56,484 crore, up by 35% from the amount in the same period last year.
Lending in the April-June quarter increased by 9% compared with the January-March quarter.
In the meantime, inflation rose to 7.56% in June because of high import costs following continuous gains of dollars against taka. In the last month of FY22, the private sector credit growth jumped to 13.66%, the highest in the last 45 months, mainly backed by soaring import payments. As part of tightening money flow amid soaring inflation, the private sector credit growth ceiling was cut to 14.1% for FY23 from 14.8% of FY22, according to the monetary policy statement for the current fiscal year.
