CDB bad loan rate at 0.31%

BEIJING -- China Development Bank, the country's policy lender, on Monday said its bad loan rate stood at 0.31 percent at the end of the first quarter.

This was the eighth straight year for the bank to see a bad loan rate under 1 percent, CDB said at a meeting on its first-quarter performances.

Its total assets topped 7.55 trillion yuan ($1.21 trillion) at the end of March 2013, the lender said.

In the first quarter, the bank lent 132.1 billion yuan to support a series of key government-supported projects in the sectors of coal, electricity, oil, transportation, agriculture, forestry, fishery, communication and infrastructure, according to CDB.

CDB in the first quarter granted 41.1 billion yuan in loans on environmental protection, energy saving and emission reduction.

In overseas businesses, outstanding loans in foreign currencies stood at $248.7 billion at the end of the first quarter, said CDB, also the country's biggest foreign investment and financing bank.

It will continue to serve state strategies and work to help transform the economic growth mode and boost the growth of the real economy, said Hu Huaibang, secretary of the CDB Committee of the Communist Party of China.