The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Coronavirus: “no alarming upswings” by companies, according to Bpifrance

2020-03-03T10:09:10.946Z


The demand for loan reschedulings is "extremely low" and could remain so, said the director general of the Public Investment Bank, Nicolas Dufourcq.


French companies are not yet reporting " alarming " financial difficulties related to the Covid-19 health crisis, said Tuesday March 3 Bpifrance general manager Nicolas Dufourcq.

Read also: Faced with the coronavirus, an expected coordinated economic response

" We have no alarming or alarmist feedback from the world of SMEs or mid-size companies ," assured Nicolas Dufourcq on the air at BFM Business. "At the moment we are not seeing a collapse in demand and cries of panic from our customers, not at all, " he added.

In addition, the factories in China of large French groups in which Bpifrance holds a share of the capital " are at 60% or 70% of capacity and will return to 100% of capacity by the middle of April, " said Nicolas Dufourcq.

The logistics and shipping sector " has been shutdown so the warehouses in the United States and Europe are absolutely empty, " said the director general of the public investment bank. But there too, he wanted to be reassuring. " What is expected is that within 15 days this sector will start again, " he said.

Concerning the possibility for companies that would encounter difficulties in rescheduling their loans, Nicolas Dufourcq indicated that Bpifrance would reactivate a tool created for this purpose by its precursor Oséo in 2009, during the financial crisis. This consists for Bpifrance " on the basis of a guarantee fund endowed with a little public money to guarantee 70% of the risk of cash loans from French private banks to SMEs, " he explained.

In addition, " if an SME direct client of Bpifrance has a temporary cash flow difficulty, it comes to see us and we can also reschedule its loan ", he promised. Bpifrance directly grants 8 billion euros per year in cash loans to French SMEs. The amount of cash loans granted by private banks is " much higher ", said Nicolas Dufourcq.

Read also: "Coronavirus: strong economic consequences for France"

The managing director of Bpifrance finally estimated that at present, the demand for rescheduling is " extremely weak and it is not excluded that it remains relatively weak ". He said that similar facilities had been put in place for the tourism sector after the 2015 attacks in Paris and Nice in 2016 but that they had been little used.

See also - Bruno Le Maire: the coronavirus will have a “much more significant” impact than expected

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-03-03

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z
News/Politics 2024-03-28T05:25:00.011Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.