11/21/2007 15h50

Industries to have lower interest rate from BNDES

Folha de S. Paulo - 11/21/2007

The BNDES (Brazilian Social and Economic Development Bank) will have an essential role in the new industrial policy the government is developing: It will be the main financial agent and, with the purpose of making the access to credit easier, it will reduce its interest rates and increase the participation in the funding of private projects. That is, the bank will reduce the requirement of the private capital commitment, increasing the percentage to be financed. In some cases, the BNDES already loans up to 90% of the full amount of the projects. In the case of the interests charged for the loans, the idea is to reduce the rates even more for the sectors chosen as priority. Currently, the bank already works with differentiated rates for sectors considered strategic - electric energy and software, for example. In order to outline the participation of the bank in the new industrial policy of the government and taking the suggestions of the institution, the president of the BNDES, Luciano Coutinho, has had frequent meetings with persons from the State Office and the ministries of Science and Technology, Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, Finance, and Planning. It has already been defined that one of the main lines of the proposal will be the promotion of technological innovation, with prominence to two sectors: pharmacos and automobiles. In the first case, the bank studies to finance especially public laboratories that produce medicines for SUS (Brazilian Health System). The idea is to reorganize the network of official labs and guide each one of them towards the production of specific medicines, always taking into account the need to supply the public hospital system. The project in study is carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Health. In the case of the car industry, the purpose is the same: to focus the support of the governmental bank in innovation. In order to do so, the BNDES studies the financing of the development of prototypes and models of vehicles totally developed in the country, including the whole design part. Other sectors may also benefit from the special financing conditions, but always, likewise, with the focus towards technological innovation.