NEXIM Bank to establish buyer credit facility by 2015

The Nigerian Export-Import Bank (NEX­IM) is working to provide buyer-credit facilities to poten­tial buyers of Nigerian non-oil products, as a way of boosting exports and deepening transac­tions with the nation’s trading partners, particularly those in the Wes- Africa region.

Roberts Orya, NEXIM Bank managing director, said the ini­tiative is calculated to make Ni­geria’s non-oil exporters more competitive in the marketplace and enable them have an edge over their peers by 2015.

Orya said NEXIM bank is in talks with its shareholders- the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Ministry of Finance, to get them to enhance the bank’s share capital so that they can use part of it to begin to offer buyer credit facilities.

Buyers Credit is a financial arrangement in which a bank or financial institution, or an export credit agency in the ex­porting country, extends a loan directly to a foreign buyer, or to a bank in the importing country, to pay for goods and services from the exporting country. Also known as financial credit, this does not refer to credit extended directly from the buyer to the seller (for example, through advance payment for goods and services).

In a buyer credit deal, the exporter gets paid on the due date; whereas the importer gets extended date for making an import payment as per the cash flows, among other benefits to the parties involved.

At the BusinessDay in-house briefing session at the weekend, Orya disclosed that NEXIM Bank is already availing those buyer credit facilities from other EXIM Banks to help local producers

For instance, “NEXIM bank has about $20 million from EXIM bank of India which it cannot use for any other trans­action apart from people that are either importing machines from India or industrial raw materials from there,” Orya informed.

He believes that the Nige­rian economy has gotten to the level where it can also begin to give the potential buyers of its products money to buy, at least within the sub region, as he especially sees this as to the next step for Nigeria’s export sector.

Nexim Bank was set up to promote the diversification of Nigeria›s economy and develop and deepen the external sector by providing credit facilities and risk bearing facilities, such as export credit guarantees and credit insurance, trade and market information as well as business and financial advisory services.

The bank also complements .

in attracting foreign capital in­vestment towards the develop­ment and growth of targeted in­dustries and strategic sectors of the economy, through availing of concessional lines of credit, co-financing arrangements and facilitation of buyers’ / suppli­ers’ credit towards the adoption and acquisition of new and clean technologies, as well as access to patents/intellectual properties, among others.

As the nation’s export credit agency, NEXIM Bank has evolved a series of initiatives to boost the nation’s non-oil export.

In 2010 and with a seed fund of N500 million, the bank de­veloped the ECOWAS Trade Support Facility (ETSF) which is a fund to encourage whoever wants to export within the sub region, mostly the Small and Me­dium Scale Enterprises (SMEs).

Last year, the bank was able to give out N350million under the ESTF but plans to scale it up to N1 billion in 2013.