Total volume of lending, excluding the central government, posted strong growth in July, by 8.9 percent year-on-year, the state news agency Hina said on Wednesday citing publicly available data released by the central bank HNB.

This increase resulted mostly from the July increase in loans, or 3.8 billion kuna (€506 million) or 1.5 percent, based on transactions.

Broken down by sectors, loans to non-financial corporations recorded the largest growth, by 2.6 billion kuna. Of that amount, loans granted to a smaller number of electricity and gas distribution companies accounted for around 2.0 billion kuna, which they intend to use for the financing of investments and working capital, HNB said.

The fast growth in loans to non-financial corporations in July, coupled with the decline in such loans in July 2021, resulted in a considerable acceleration of growth in annual terms, to 15.7 percent in July from 12.3 percent in June.

Household lending also continued to grow, by 1.2 billion, mostly reflecting the increase in housing loans, by 1 billion, under the effect of the subsidized housing loan program, while general-purpose cash loans grew only slightly by 200 million kuna. Despite the relatively strong growth in housing loans in July, their growth slowed down from 9.5 percent to 9.3 percent year-on-year.

The growth in general-purpose cash loans held steady at the level from May (3.6 percent), so the growth in total loans to households slowed down moderately from 5.6 percent to 5.5 percent, HNB said.

(€1 = 7.51 kuna)