Russian banks are increasingly less likely to provide loans to IT companies for new projects. The trend is associated with an increase in the Central Bank rate and the lack of assets among IT companies that they could provide to banks as collateral. This was reported by Izvestia referring to market participants.
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According to one of the publication’s interlocutors, the problem has persisted for a month. Banks do not grant loans at all or grant them at prohibitive interest rates. Credit institutions explain this by the “lack of available funds.”
The newspaper’s source confirmed that this explanation is justified and logical, since due to the increase in the Central Bank rate to 21%, people began to deposit funds in short-term deposits, and banks will have to return them with interest at the beginning. of year. next year.
“If previous failures were more of an exception, they are now becoming a systemic problem. Even large players in the market are faced with the fact that banks refuse financing or offer such high interest rates that the loan becomes economically unfeasible,” Sergei Matusevich, director of development of web technologies at Artezio (part of the group LANIT).
According to Matusevich, this applies above all to startups in the field of artificial intelligence, companies developing complex technological solutions for industry, and import substitution projects for foreign software. This is because in this type of development “the result depends largely on the research component and requires significant investments,” which is what worries the banks.
The publication notes that IT companies find it difficult to obtain a bank loan, partly because they have virtually nothing to offer as collateral. At the same time, banks refuse to accept the project’s intellectual property as collateral.
The Ministry of Digital Development, in turn, told Izvestia that it had not received any requests from IT companies on this issue.
“We offer companies various support measures aimed at the creation of new IT products and import substitution. The preferential loan program will end in 2024, which shows high demand. All necessary funds have been fully allocated to the companies. More projects were supported than initially planned,” the department informed Izvestia.
Due to the inaccessibility of credit financing, IT companies have to develop with their own funds, Karen Kazaryan, director of the Internet Research Institute, told the newspaper. Ultimately, it is consumers of IT products who will have to share the costs of supporting IT infrastructure with businesses.
“This, for example, means that there will be fewer discounts and promotions in online stores and markets, the loading speed of your favorite sites may decrease, and some services may even stop working. In general, prices of goods and services sold online may increase. But in this way it will be possible to maintain the operation and basic functionality of popular platforms,” Kazaryan concluded.
Author:
Anastasia Kossakovskaya
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
