Resona Holdings Inc. is targeting a fivefold increase in corporate loans this year, signaling Japan's fifth-biggest bank is confident that the economic recovery is strong enough to spur business spending.
Resona plans to increase loans to companies by ¥300 billion in the year ending March 2015, compared with ¥60 billion the previous fiscal year, President Kazuhiro Higashi said in a recent interview in Tokyo.
Machinery orders, an indicator of future corporate investment, jumped the most since 1996 in March, government figures showed this week. Higashi, 57, said his bank needs to boost credit volume to make up for a decline in lending profitability as monetary policies to stimulate the world's third-largest economy drag down interest rates.