The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) and the financial community have been running the R&D Commercialization Bank since 2013, providing 300 billion won annually in low-interest loans to SMEs with successful R&D results and technologies with great potential.
This is the special financial program’s third year. It is designed to help SMEs with huge potential be successful. From June, they will be joined by Industrial Bank of Korea and Woori Bank to provide soft loans to promising SMEs. Woori Bank will unleash 125.8 billion won in loans while IBK will release 186.63 billion won. The two banks got 3 trillion won that the MOTIE allocated to support R&D activities by SMEs. Their low-interest loans came from funds deposited by the MOTIE, amounting to 300 billion won annually.
Most of the soft loans will go to SMEs employing women for their R&D activities and to support the Demand Search Support Team Search Firms and others to commercialize technologies.
During the first two years of the program, the soft loans were dished out to SMEs which completed R&D on the subject provided by the MOTIE within three years, SMEs with technologies which earned the technology evaluation certificates from the technology evaluation organizations such as the Technology Guarantee Fund, the Korea Invention Promotion Association and the Korea Science Technology Information Research Institute, the SMEs which got guarantees from the R&D Commercialization Guarantee, and the SMEs that got the transfers of trust, delayed contributions and technology sharing through the Technology Sharing System.
This year, the third year of the program, the loans will go to companies that hire many women, putting them to work in key positions and areas of their operations. Also in the spotlight are SMEs that got citations for the Outstanding Use of Women Personnel through the creation of a women-friendly work environment from the MOTIE; companies that search out the demand search support teams; those possessing capacities and intentions to operate their businesses with the public technologies as a base searched out by the Demand Search Support Team, which was formed by the professionals for technology commercialization promoted jointly by industry, academics and research institutes and the SMEs which have been promoting the commercialization of the technologies developed by the non-profit organizations on the R&D subjects provided by the MOTIE.
The banks that provide soft loans will not stop there, but will also provide all kinds of consultations on various areas including management, the inheritance of businesses, tax, accounting, laws, green businesses, start-ups and the intelligent properties, often tailor-made integrated consulting for free.
In the first two years of the program, a total of 321.3 billon won was provided to 257 SMEs from May 2014 to April 2015. According to an analyses made by the two banks taking charge of the soft loans, IBK-provided loans bore interest rates lower by 1.9 percent on average than commercial loans on average. Woori Bank’s loans bore the interest rates 0.5 percent lower than the general bank loans.
The soft loans provided to the SMEs to commercialize their technologies saved some 4.04 billion won in interest payments so far to ease their financial crunch.
The SMEs that got soft loans for the commercialization if R&D activities were preferred over loans they got from general banks, boosting the benefits for them to continue to commercialize the technologies. Some 71 percent of the SMEs that got soft loans said they were very satisfied with the loans, and 91 percent said they would recommend the service to other SMEs. MOTIE has been sharing stories of the success of its R&D Commercialization Bank with other government agencies to develop the related businesses, MOTIE officials said.
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