China's top lender, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd, will keep up its pace of bumper profit growth as it seeks to expand its footprint in Asia and beyond, Chairman Jiang Jianqing said. Fresh from reporting a 52 percent surge in net profit for the January-March quarter.
Jiang said the state-controlled bank aimed to sustain the rate of earnings growth as it generated more income from fees. "We expect to prolong this period of high growth in profits," he told Reuters at ICBC's headquarters in the Chinese capital.
The lender, which raised $21.9 billion in the world's biggest share flotation in October, was earning more money from areas of the business other than plain vanilla lending, long the mainstay of profits in Chinese banking. Between 2003 and last year, income from intermediary services surged 43 percent, he said.
With its 17,000 branches, the country's largest bank by assets still has huge potential to tap a market where rapidly rising incomes are generating demand for more sophisticated banking services. As the world's third-largest lender in terms of market capitalisation, ICBC was also setting its sights on a larger sphere of influence beyond China's borders.
"If there are appropriate chances, prices and timing, we will consider that (acquisitions)," Jiang said. After agreeing in late December to buy a 90 percent stake in PT Bank Halim Indonesia, ICBC was keen to develop a presence in the Middle East and Latin America, he said.
The bank was eager to set up a branch in the United States - where an application had yet to be approved - and to set up in countries that enjoyed close economic ties with China. ICBC confirmed on Tuesday that it was in discussions to cooperate with London-based Travelex, which runs 700 currency-exchange kiosks in more than 30 countries. But the secretary to the bank's board denied a newspaper report that ICBC wanted to acquire the privately owned firm.
To boost market share at home, ICBC would pour 1 billion yuan ($130 million) a year into setting up new wealth management centres across China over the coming three years, Jiang said. By that time, ICBC would have 200 centres targeting the super-rich and around 3,000 serving relatively wealthy clients.
The bank, in which Goldman Sachs, Allianz Group and American Express hold strategic stakes, would branch out into new areas of non-banking business as regulations allowed, Jiang said.aid.