China will encourage commercial banks to extend loans to more small companies at the grassroots level, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said on Friday.

In its latest guidelines on the banking sector's financial services for small businesses, the CBRC told commercial lenders that the number of small companies in receipt of loans should be no smaller than the previous year and the proportion of small companies receiving loans should not be lower than the previous year.

These two targets have been set in addition to a previous target that credit growth to micro and small companies should not be lower than the average overall growth of credit.

Zhang Jinping, deputy director of the CBRC's Financial Inclusion Affairs Department, said: "We now put more emphasis on greater coverage of small companies by bank loans and a larger rate of success for their loan applications. This will coordinate with our country's economic restructuring."

The banking regulator had previously told banks that the incremental amount of credit to micro and small companies should not be less than that recorded a year earlier. As the Chinese economy faces increasing downward pressure in 2015, this target is no longer in accordance with the nation's economic realities.

"Credit growth to small companies is a big challenge for commercial banks during the economic downturn. Even some powerful small companies dare not to borrow from banks to develop new projects due to their concerns about the economy. Lenders are also evaluating which clients have relatively high financial risk in order to recall loans to them," said Wang Fuliang, who is in charge of financial services for small companies at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd.

The CBRC's emphasis on increased lending to smaller companies will stop banks from lending to certain project companies that have multi-million-yuan assets but are still categorized as small companies due to their small number of employees. Instead, banks will lend to more small companies in the real sense, Wang said.

As of Dec 31, outstanding credit to micro and small companies had reached 20.7 trillion yuan ($3.3 trillion), or almost 24 percent of total loans. Credit growth was 4.2 percentage points higher than that of the average growth of total credit. Around 11.45 million micro and small companies had received loans, up 9 percent from the previous year, according to the CBRC.