The international financial crisis has caused UniCredit Leasing, the leading player on this market with annual funding worth 500 million euros, to cut back significantly on business project financing and turn down companies it would have granted loans to last year.The international financial crisis has caused UniCredit Leasing, the leading player on this market with annual funding worth 500 million euros, to cut back significantly on business project financing and turn down companies it would have granted loans to last year.
"We are no longer granting finance to companies we would have accepted a year or two years ago. In the past we would more readily finance start-ups, but we are now looking more carefully and prefer established companies. Secondly, we started to exchange information with other leasing companies for the first time this year, to avoid taking somebody else's bad-paying customers in our portfolio," Septimiu Postelnicu, general manager of UniCredit Leasing, told ZIARUL FINANCIAR in an interview.
Postelnicu, one of the best-known managers in the leasing business says the 4 RON/EUR threshold is a serious warning about the repayment capability of the financing granted to both companies and individuals.
"Four RON against one euro is a sufficiently serious threshold to draw everybody's attention. This is a very serious warning already, this is no joke. We cannot wait for the exchange rate to increase, we are already starting to raise questions," UniCredit Leasing's boss said.
He believes Romanian companies have forgotten what it means to manage foreign exchange risk after several years of relative stability, and the crisis will teach them a "painful lesson" and show them the risk really exists. Corporate clients account for 90% of UniCredit Leasing's portfolio.
"Because financing will be more difficult to get, it is only
