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China Construction Bank, the nation's third-largest lender, said pretax profit fell by more than half in 2002, after it increased provisions for bad loans, Bloomberg reports.
The Shanghai-based lender said in a statement that it earned 4.3 billion yuan ($523 million) in profit before tax last year, compared with 9.2 billion yuan in 2001.
Its pre-provision profit rose 16.2 percent to 34.4 billion yuan, but most of that profit was used to write off 30.1 billion yuan worth of historical bad loans.
The bank’s non-performing loans fell 2.94 percentage points last year, but it didn’t give the details.
The bank's 2001 pre-provision profit was 24.1 billion yuan, according to China Construction's annual report. The bank made a provision of 18.9 billion yuan in 2001.
(Edited by china.org.cn January 8, 2003)
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