Foreign lenders lining up to offer cheap loans to India firms

Foreign lenders lining up to offer cheap loans to India firmsForeign banks have for sometime lining up to offer cheap loans to Indian Inc firms, which are turning their focus to overseas businesses to reduce their dependency on sluggish Indian market.

Some American and European banks last year rolled back from the Indian market due to economic slump, but a few months back financing offers from banks like Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered started emerging again.

Experts say that foreign banks are taking advantage of a window of opportunity of loose monetary policy, before the potential rolling back of quantitative easing (QE) by the US Federal Reserve and central banks of European countries.

Rolling back of QE program will increase cost of funding, which will make loans costlier.

The corporate finance head at a European bank in Mumbai, said, "The dollar loan market is now available in a big way if anybody wants to tap it, there are enough banks coming in now.  Things have improved in the last six months."

Indian companies are also apparently trying their best to tap the opportunity.  India's Apollo Tyres recently hit a $2.5 billion bid to acquire New York-listed Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. the deal will totally be funded by taking loans from foreign banks.

According to Thomson Reuters, Indian companies are bidding for more than $10 billion worth of merger & acquisition deals this year.