The Bank of China (BOC) Monday announced that in the first half of this year it made a paper profit of 7.025 billion yuan (849.46 million US dollars) and an operating profit of 21.346 billion yuan (2.58 billion dollars).

BOC tops Chinese banks in half-year profits, its spokeswoman said, adding that the rate of the bank's non-performing loans was 25.39 percent, down 2.12 percentage points from the beginning of the year.

In the first half of this year the bank made great strides in systems innovation, and paid close attention to building good corporate governance mechanisms, she said. A prominent success forthe bank was the successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the Bank of China (HK), which would be listed in Hong Kong on July 25.

Statistics show that at the end of June, the BOC's deposits in Renminbi increased to 93.5 billion yuan (about 11.31 billion dollars), or 9.28 percent of the domestic market share. Its foreign exchange deposits rose to 3.158 billion US dollars, or 57.02 percent of the market share.

The BOC has also made great progress in corporate business and investment banking. The BOC International Securities Co. Ltd. formerly opened for business in March in Shanghai, while BOC Insurance is planning to open branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places.

The bank continued to step up business supervision and risk control measures. In the first half year it prosecuted and handled21 law-breaking cases, down 46 percent from the same period last year, involving a total sum of 23.05 million yuan (about 2.79 million dollars), down 82 percent.

President of the BOC Liu Mingkang said that in the second half-year the bank would go on developing profitable products to ensurea profit growth of over five percent for the whole year.

( July 23, 2002)