China Banks Scale Up Tech Finance for High-Growth Enterprises
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China's banks are accelerating support for technology-driven firms as innovation becomes central to high-quality economic growth. Domestic and foreign lenders are expanding full-lifecycle financing to startups and fast-growing companies in technology, life sciences, and healthcare.
HSBC Bank (China) launched a dedicated tech-finance brand, committing $1.5 billion in credit to innovation-driven enterprises. The bank evaluates firms not only on financials but also on core technologies, patents, and market potential, reflecting the sector's light-asset and novel business models. HSBC aims to help unicorns, “little giant” firms, and industrial leaders expand globally.
China CITIC Financial Asset Management applied a debt-to-equity conversion and restructuring plan to Jinzhai Guoxuan New Energy, a Gotion High-Tech subsidiary. The move reduced the firm's leverage from over 70% to below 60%, restored independent fundraising, and increased cell production utilization from 55% to over 80%, unlocking its full 25-gigawatt-hour capacity.
Economists note that tech finance increasingly mirrors equity investment. Yin Jianfeng, chief economist at China Zheshang Bank, emphasizes a portfolio-based approach with longer evaluation cycles and dynamic assessment of firms' growth trajectories, rather than static financial statements. Innovative products—like unsecured loans linked to the national innovation score and investment-loan linkage with venture capital—enable banks to provide targeted, stage-appropriate financing.
China's tech lending is growing rapidly. Outstanding sci-tech loans reached RMB 3.6 trillion ($509 billion) by September 2025, up 22.3% year-on-year, with new sci-tech loans accounting for 30.5% of all new lending.
As China's high-tech ecosystem matures and firms expand overseas, banks are creating a sophisticated, flexible financial infrastructure to support innovation. For international investors and corporates, this signals opportunities to engage with fast-growing tech firms and participate in China's next phase of innovation-led growth.
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