ICICI Bank Ltd will come up with a private equity fund within the next six months in order to focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The initial corpus for the fund is likely to be around $200 million, said Sanjeev Sehrawat, general manager, business banking group.
?We would be looking for investors from the overseas market for this new product,? he said, at a seminar on alternative avenues to SME financing organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry in Kolkata on Monday.
At present, 8-9% of the bank?s total loan portfolio is for the SME sector and is growing at a rate of about 2-3% every year, Sehrawat said.
?We finance all kinds of SME sectors but at present our marketing team is focussed on pharma, jewellery, textile, auto, and ITeS SME clusters,? he said.
The SME business is growing very fast and the bank eventually sees disbursing more loans, according to Sehrawat. ?I see a fairly robust demand from SMEs and we are going to focus more on this sector in the next six months,? he said.