Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    LISTED Chinese banks are facing slower profit growth due to shrinking interest margins,nonperforming loan surges and falling capital adequacy ratios, PwC said in its latest report.

    “Across all the categories of banks that we looked at, interest income fell as a proportion of total revenue in the first half of 2016,” said Jimmy Leung, PwC’s China financial service leader.

    “There was moderate growth in non-interest income, including fee income, across the banks. These factors helped to stabilize overall growth in net profits.”

    The total net profits of 30 listed banks PwC looked at grew 4.6 percent from a year ago to reach 774.45 billion yuan.

    The overall nonperforming loan (NPL) balance (for the 29 banks that have reported it) was up 10.06 percent from the end of last year to 1.13 trillion yuan. But the NPL ratio was almost flat at 1.66 percent (up 0.04 of a percentage point) from the end of 2015.