For businesses to grow, expanding their credit portfolio is essential.

By: Trademagazin Date: 2025. 05. 20. 10:50

For businesses to grow, it is essential to expand their credit portfolio, stressed Zsuzsanna Lukács, Deputy State Secretary for Enterprise Protection at the Ministry of National Economy (NGM), on Tuesday at the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) conference entitled Figyelő Konferenciák powered by VG – Small. Medium. Strong in Budapest.

She highlighted that credit utilization among Hungarian SMEs is much lower than that of their EU counterparts.

At the same time, more than half of corporate loans in Hungary are related to the SME sector, and a significant part of this is a subsidized scheme.

She said that the goal is for the GDP ratio of SME loans to reach 20 percent by 2030, up from 11.8 percent in 2022, and for the ratio of exporting SMEs to increase to 7 percent by 2030.

He added that in the long term, the SME development strategy underpins the enterprise development policy, of which he mentioned the improvement of productivity and the increase in the proportion of SME investments within the total investment as important measures.

In his presentation, the Deputy State Secretary mentioned that enterprises refrain from taking out loans mainly because of high interest rates.

This is shown by the fact that, thanks to the general interest rate reduction, the number of loan applications in the Széchenyi Card Program increased significantly in February compared to the previous month, he noted.

Zsuzsanna Lukács also spoke about the fact that the current target system of Hungarian economic policy is based on six pillars: the development of SMEs, wage convergence, support for adequate housing, the anti-inflation program, the continuation of the tax reduction policy and the 150 factories program.