The rate of overdue payments stood at 26.7% among Hungarian companies for business-to-business deals, the lowest rate in Eastern Europe, credit insurance company Atradius said based on a survey of 1,400 regional companies. The rate of late payments was higher, reaching 70.9%, up by 4.3 percentage points from 2017. Some 57.6% of Hungarian companies said they were willing to make sales on credit. The survey found companies needed on average 49 days to pay their bills, up from 37 days last year. Businesses on average gave 30 days for companies to settle outstanding payments. Companies buying machinery on average had 39 days to make payments but ones buying farm industry services had only 20. The share of bad, uncollectable debts was at 0.8% in 2018, up from 0.6% in 2017.