Privileged Exim Bank treatment for SupremeSAT
View(s):Sri Lanka’s SupremeSAT Pvt Ltd has secured a massive and rare US$ 215 million credit facility from China’s state-owned Export-Import Bank (Exim) to design, build and launch its fully owned satellite Supremesat 2.
The satellite will be built by CGWIC (China Great Wall Industries Corp), according to SupremeSAT Chairman M.R. Manivannan.
A Sri Lankan consultant on Chinese financing and investment said that to get a loan facility from the Exim Bank, the Sri Lankan company must prove its relationship with the government along with other necessary requirements.
Mr. Manivannan told the Business Times that SupremeSAT received this financing and supplier credit facility from the Exim Bank due to “its confidence on the company’s trustworthiness and its international reputation supported by pre-launch sales contracts for the services of Supremesat 2 satellite”.
“We have now entered into the unlimited global space business arena becoming exclusive partners of many global companies and it will demonstrate that we are above the rest.
We neither depend on the government nor the public to raise the money. The art of raising the necessary financing for our business venture is our commercial capability,” he said.
Exim Bank has extended resource-backed credit lines to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Zimbabwe and other countries like Sri Lanka.
He said that the bank is neither making grants nor providing aid. It is providing loans like other commercial banks and it is actually trade financing.
Mr. Manivannan said that this is not a state funded or state sponsored project but the government facilitated the corporate structure by way of supporting with tax concessions, etc through the Board of Investment and not by way of funding or offering special approvals.
The preliminary designing process of the SupremeSAT-2 satellite is now underway with Rohitha Rajapaksa, the President’s youngest son and Chief Technical Director of SupremeSAT, being involved in the technical design.
The target market for the company’s satellite services is not restricted to Sri Lanka and it is already near finalisation of viable contracts for SupremeSAT-2.
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