Chinese Internet trading website Alibaba.com and China Construction Bank have jointly launched a low-interest loan service for medium and small Chinese companies.
At present, the service is available to enterprises in ten cities of Zhejiang Province, and it is expected to be opened in Guangdong soon. Statistics from local media show that Alibaba has helped up to 100 small enterprises obtain more than CNY160 million loans in total thanks to its solid online credit and risk control system. In 2007, Alibaba launched several new loan services for smaller enterprises in cooperation with China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, of which the "Online Warranty Loan" it launched jointly with China Construction Bank is the most popular.
Zhao Lin, vice president of China Construction Bank, says it is a financial innovation for modern commercial banks to break through the traditional loan pattern and make online e-commerce credit an important premise in issuing loans. In this way, Alibaba has created a new way to solve the difficulty of medium and small enterprises' financing by offering this type of loan.