The Export Credit Insurance Corporation (KUKE), a joint stock company, wants to increase the guarantees limit on behalf of the State Treasury. According to Rzeczpospolita unofficial sources, KUKE is negotiating the increase of the limit by ZL2bn.
The Coface group has obtained a licence to deliver insurance products in Poland. It will be opening a domestic and export credit insurance branch there in the near future via its Austrian subsidiary ЦKV Coface.
The government has initiated a project aimed at helping small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by revoking income tax on released bank reserves.
The well-known juice producer Hortex has obtained credit totalling ZL85 million. The creditors are BPH PBK, Fortis Bank and factoring company, Forin. The move finalises the company's restructuring process, started in 2001.
The European giants of merchant credit insurance, Coface and Gerling NCM, are increasingly interested in the Polish market.
Small enterprises dominate the Polish economy, constituting more than 99% of all active companies. According to a report on the state of the SME sector presented by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP), their condition is not good.
Poland's biggest non state-owned bank, Pekao SA, has pledged that its shareholders may expect some good financial results after the second quarter of 2003.
In 2002, the total value of invoices purchased by companies engaged in factoring activities reached ZL10bn, compared to ZL8bn a year earlier. About 1,000 companies used the service.
Criticism is levelled at the government by small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) proprietors due to the methods employed to save big state-owned firms from bankruptcy.
In the first, frothy years of Poland's post-communist transformation, more than a million small businesses set up shop, selling everything from cosmetics to car accessories. The sector has produced extraordinary success stories.
