Citic Bank's funds invested in debt not publicly traded at 64%

Funds invested in debt that is not publicly traded accounted for 64 percent, or 151.5 billion yuan ($24.2 billion), of all the wealth management products at China Citic Bank Corp at the end of 2012, Zhang Qiang, the bank's vice-president, said on Friday.

New rules released by the China Banking Regulatory Commission on Wednesday said that similar non-standard investments shouldn't exceed 35 percent of a bank's total issued wealth management products or 4 percent of the bank's total assets at the end of the previous year.

Zhang said at a press briefing that the total wealth management products of the bank were worth 279 billion yuan, which indicated that the lender has nearly 54 billion yuan to remove from the non-standard investments.

On Thursday, Citic Bank reported 0.7 percent growth in its 2012 net profit to 31.03 billion yuan, a surge of 3.9 billion yuan in bad loans and 11.3 billion yuan in overdue loans.

Zhu Xiaohuang, the bank's president, attributed the slower-than-expected growth to the increase of more than 3 billion yuan in provisions for bad loans.

"It's normal that our lending costs increase as provisions go up," Zhu said.

By the end of last year, the bank's provision-to-total-loans ratio stood at 2.12 percent, below the regulation criteria of 2.5 percent.

Zhu said they would boost efforts to reclaim the soured loans through multiple measures in 2013.

"We hope to reclaim bad loans of 6 billion yuan this year, in contrast with the 2.7 billion yuan in 2012," Zhu said.

The bank's core capital adequacy ratio dropped to 9.89 percent from 9.91 percent in the previous year.

Cao Guoqiang, another vice-president at the bank, said overall capital conditions are still solid after the lender sold subordinated loans worth 20 billion yuan last year.