The banking sector’s asset quality remained unchanged last month, as the non-performing loan (NPL) ratio stayed at 1.63 percent, Financial Supervisory Commission data showed yesterday.
Bad loans by the nation’s 37 banks totaled NT$293.3 billion (US$8.98 billion) at the end of last month — a 0.44 percent decline month-on-month and a decrease of NT$3.1 billion from one year earlier, the commission’s data showed.
The sector granted a total of NT$18.03 trillion in loans last month, down from NT$18.1 trillion in March, while the coverage ratio — loans covered by banks’ provisions — dropped by 0.17 percentage points month-on-month to 68.52 percent, the data showed.
Twenty-seven of the 37 banks had an NPL ratio of less than 2.5 percent, while nine had NPL ratios of between 2.5 percent and 5 percent. Chinfon Commercial Bank (慶豐銀行) continued to top the list with an NPL ratio of 37.73 percent at the end of last month though all of its bad loans under the government’s custody had been sold off to private asset management firms in late March.
“The commission will take action to instruct banks with high NPLs to improve their asset quality,” the commission said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the commission’s latest statistics showed that the nation’s publicly traded financial institutions, including financial holding companies and insurance companies, suffered a 4.09 percent decline in revenues last year to NT$1.18 trillion. Pre-tax losses totaled NT$8.7 billion last year, compared with NT$172.7 billion losses in 2007, the data showed.
Among them, 13 financial holding companies showed a total of NT$723.7 billion in revenues last year, a decrease of NT$99.7 billion from one year earlier, with a pre-tax profit of NT$7.6 billion, or a 95 percent decline year-on-year.
As of the first quarter of this year, publicly traded financial institutions appeared to have returned to profit, totaling NT$407.5 billion in revenues, or 35 percent year-on-year growth, and NT$32.9 billion in pre-tax profit, 309 percent up from one year earlier, the data showed.
The 13 financial holding companies reported NT$283.8 billion in total revenues in the first quarter of this year, a 58.7 percent year-on-year growth, with a pre-tax profit of NT$26.2 billion, NT$27.5 billion up from one year earlier, the data showed.
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