Industrial Bank targets to issue 2.5 million new credit cards this year to boost its retail banking, its vice president said yesterday.

The Fujian Province-based bank prefers to seek a healthy growth in the number of cards rather than a too rapid jump, said Yan Xuewang, the bank's vice president of retail banking, in Shanghai.

The bank will also try and ensure that its clients hold on average 1.1 of its credit cards per capita to maximize the effectiveness of the product so that its cards are frequently used rather than one client holding several cards which are hardly used.

Transactions involving credit cards have totaled 12 billion yuan (US$1.71 billion) so far this year, Yan said. The figure last year was 19.2 billion yuan.

Shanghai-listed Industrial Bank has issued 3.5 million credit cards at the end of the first quarter and has a bad loan ratio of 1.08 percent.

The bank, which entered the credit card business four years ago, sees the business as the second most lucrative retail banking product after individual mortgages by 2013 with a profit of 13 billion yuan or 22 percent of banks' total retail banking profits, McKinsey&Co said earlier.

China has more than 71.62 million credit cards in circulation at the end of 2007, up 144 percent from a year ago, the People's Bank of China said earlier.

The bank ended at 36.55 yuan yesterday, down 0.49 percent, while the key Shanghai Composite Index shed 0.54 percent to 3,604.76.

(Shanghai Daily May 20, 2008)