China banks' first-quarter bad loan ratio largely unchanged at 1.8%: regulator
Reuters
Published May 10, 2019 04:28AM ET
China banks' first-quarter bad loan ratio largely unchanged at 1.8%: regulator
BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Chinese commercial banks' non-performing loan (NPL) ratio stood at 1.8% at the end of the first quarter, compared with 1.89% at the end of 2018, the banking and insurance regulator said on Friday.
The amount of NPLs at commercial banks rose to 2.16 trillion yuan ($317.66 billion) at the end of March, up 95.7 billion yuan from the start of the year, Liu Zhiqing, deputy head of the statistics department at the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) told reporters.
The end-March total was the highest since the end of 2003, according to Reuters calculations based on official data.
Liu said Chinese banks disposed of 368.9 billion yuan in bad loans over the first quarter, an increase of 30.9 billion yuan compared with a year earlier. No details were provided on the form of the disposals.
The first quarter bad-loan data comes at a time Chinese authorities have been encouraging banks to increase their lending to small and mid-sized businesses, to help combat a slowdown in economic growth.
According to the data, lenders beefed up their capital strength in January-March to fend off risks. The average capital adequacy ratio at commercial banks at end-March was 14.18%, which the regulator said was 0.57 percentage point higher than one year earlier. The banks' provision coverage ratio rose 3.13 percentage points over the three-month period to 192.2%, it said.
The CBIRC, which also oversees the operations of China's 19.1 trillion yuan insurance sector, said insurers' premium income in the first quarter rose 15.9% from a year earlier to 1.6 trillion yuan.
The outstanding amount of insurance fund investment rose to 17.1 trillion yuan, up 3.9% from end-2018.
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Written By: Reuters
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