State Bank of India seeks to explore the project financing opportunities in Qatar as the country scales up infrastructure spending and launches several projects across various sectors, a newspaper report has said.

SBI has also set its eyes on providing trade finance to Indian companies, thereby facilitating a quantitative jump in Qatar-India bilateral trade, the Gulf Times report said.

The SBI Corporate Banking Group Managing Director, Mr Hemant G. Contractor, is visiting Qatar and is scheduled to meet leading Qatari officials.

India is now one of Qatar’s largest trading partners as a major consumer of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas, crude and petrochemical products.

The Doha visit of Mr Hemant G. Contractor follows the approval from the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority for SBI to open a Category-I bank branch at the Qatar Financial Centre.

SBI has already taken on lease office space in Doha to open the branch at an early date, Mr Satyajit Pratap, CEO designate of the QFC branch, told the newspaper.

The branch will be a ‘wholesale banking set up’ and facilitate/provide commercial banking services to business customers operating from Qatar. The State Bank Group has about 16,279 branches and 14,190 ATMs spread all over India, which is among the fastest growing major economies of the world.

SBI is ranked 150th in the Forbes 2000 list of largest companies in the world, and is the only Indian bank to find a place in the Fortune Global 500 list.

The bank has been ranked 8th in the top 25 banks in Asia by The Banker magazine. With a balance sheet size of $234 billion as of March 31, it is a regional banking behemoth with a market share of 16.28 per cent and 17.72 per cent in advances and deposits, respectively.

In 2010-end, SBI had a network of 150 foreign offices including 42 branches, 90 subsidiary offices, two joint ventures, eight representative offices and two exchange companies, across 32 countries.

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