E.Sun
E.Sun likes to cite the Taiwan government’s annual gongs honouring this heavily industrialized island’s ‘outstanding small and medium enterprises’ as validation of its SME business. The awards are assessed by the economics ministry and, since 2014, a third of the winners have been E.Sun clients.
The last awards, for 2018, marked a particularly proud year for E.Sun; nine of the 22 awardees were clients. Chief executive Joseph Huang says the SME segment is in E.Sun’s DNA because it still remembers when it was one itself, not so long ago.
Owned by its employees, E.Sun was founded in 1992 with the very purpose of serving Taiwan’s SMEs, and it has grown as its customers have, to make Taiwan a crucial cog in the global supply chain. The bank says its SME loan book in 2018 was NT$347.3 billion ($11 billion), almost 6% higher than 2017, the best sectoral growth of its peers. As of December 2018, E.Sun says credit guarantee financing totalled NT$38.6 billion, ranking it in the top five in the market.
During the year, E.Sun opened branches in Brisbane, Guangzhou and Phnom Penh, and now boasts 28 outlets in nine countries.
It has followed its manufacturing sector customers into Hong Kong, Singapore, Cambodia, Myanmar and Australia, where E.Sun’s branches are fully integrated into the parent to allow local clients to avail of financial services by deploying property held in Taiwan and sometimes in mainland China too, as collateral for locally required loans.