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CHINA
Trust Commercial Banking Corp. will rely on corporate
and retail banking to save its loan portfolio and prop
up income this year.
The bank
also lowered its growth forecast this year to a more
doable level after a sharp decline in profits last year
from a year earlier, bank officials said during their
annual stockholders’ meeting yesterday.
The bank
will use 2006 as a benchmark for its income because its
2007 revenues from fixed-income trading was hit by a
volatile market.
China
Trust president and vice chairman William Go said that
while the bank is boosting its retail loan portfolio, it
will also be active in corporate finance and treasury
trading.
“We will
build our retail-loan portfolio and actively participate
in corporate finance. Our treasury group will also be
offering diverse products,” Go said.
“We are
focusing on the corporate sector, but we will not
abandon retail… we are strong in retail,” he added.
For
2007, the bank posted net income of P114 million from
P493 million the previous year. Bank officials said this
was due to lower revenues from fixed-income trading due
to market volatility because of global risk aversion.
Trading
gains last year dropped to P85 million from P548 million
a year earlier.
However,
revenues from foreign- exchange trading went up to P65
million from the previous year’s P42 million.
The
bank’s corporate-loan portfolio also suffered from
paydowns by large corporations, which directly accessed
the capital markets for cheaper funding. China Trust’s
loan portfolio in 2007 shrank by P4 billion. Net
interest income from loans and receivables also declined
by 13 percent.
The bank
posted a net income of P12.12 million for the first
quarter of the year, up from P 87.20 million a year
earlier.
China
Trust chief finance officer Jeric Salamino said the bank
is expanding its loan portfolio by 16 percent.
Roland
Avante, the bank’s executive vice president and head of
the treasury group, said the bank is looking at a net
income of P300 million to P400 million this year, half
of which is expected to be generated by regular banking
business and half from treasury gains.
“I think
we’ll be able to improve definitely, I think we are
looking at P300 million to P400 million. I guess much of
the ability to do that will come from the conditions of
the financial market. But for the past few months, the
market had not been friendly,” Avante said.
“But if
there is one part of the market we are good at, it’s the
foreign-exchange market,” he added.
The bank
finished 2007 with total assets of P19 billion and gross
loan portfolio of P12.76 billion. Total deposits stood
at P7.29 billion.
Its
capital stood at P4.97 billion with a capital-adequacy
ratio of 27.31 percent against the regulatory level of
10 percent. |
