Bank of China, the nation's second-largest lender by assets, wrote off 72.4 billion yuan (US$8.75 billion) of bad debt last year to help clean up its balance sheet ahead of a planned initial share sale next year.
The proportion of total loans that were non-performing dropped "substantially," the oldest Chinese bank said on its Web site, without providing the figure. The bank's bad-loan ratio stood at 22.49 percent at the end of 2002.
China plans to sell stakes in Bank of China, China Construction Bank and two other state-owned lenders to reduce bad loans estimated at more a fifth of their total lending. The government gave Bank of China US$22.5 billion before the end of last year to help the lender speed up plans to sell shares.
Bank of China, which had a capital-adequacy ratio of 8.15 percent at the end of 2002, plans to sell shares either in China or overseas within two years, chief executive Xiao Gang said last year.
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