The Bank of China (BOC), one of the nation's major four state-owned commercial banks, said Wednesday it has scheduled its initial public offering for 2005, one year before the market is fully opened to foreign competitors.

"We hope it's 2005," Hua Qingshan, the bank's executive vice-president, said in response to a question at a high-profile conference.

The bank still has a lot to do, including disposing of massive non-performing loans, and "the timetable is quite tight," he said.

Hua said his bank is trying to become a pilot bank in a reform package the government has tailored for the four State-owned commercial banks -- the BOC, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Agricultural Bank of China.

Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said earlier this week that the central government had approved a reform plan for the four and will pick one or two of them for a trial. The reform will include further disposal of bad loans, recapitalization and restructuring.

"We are working actively to become one of the pilot banks,'' Hua said, adding that the successful IPO of its subsidiary BOC Hong Kong has brought his bank some experience that all the other three banks do not have.

The BOC is pushing wide-ranging reforms that span from creating a risk management system independent from the management to streamlining networks and trimming the payroll.

In a related development, Li Zhanchen, vice-president of the China Great Wall Asset Management Company, said asset management companies (AMCs) will play a larger role in disposing of China's huge non-performing loans (NPLs).

"Looking at the current financial situation, asset management companies will continue to play their specialized role in the disposal of non-performing loans," Li said.

China established four AMCs in 1999 to specialize in the disposal of NPLs from the State-owned commercial banks.

There have since been criticisms of low efficiency and high costs, and signs that the State-owned banks are getting directly involved in the business spell some uncertainty for the future of AMCs.

But such criticisms are "unfair," Li said, insisting that noticeable achievements have been made in the work of Chinese AMCs, even when compared with their counterparts in the United States and South Korea.

The four AMCs had disposed of 498 billion yuan (US$60 billion) in NPLs as of October this year with a cash recovery ratio of 17.3 percent, while expenditures totaled 7.6 billion yuan (US$915 million), a competitive 0.54 percent of total NPLs it took over four years ago.

Outstanding NPLs at Chinese banking institutions totaled 2 trillion yuan (US$240 billion) at the end of October.

(China Daily December 4, 2003)