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Net
profit rose to 64.4 billion yuan ($10.07 billion) for the
July-September quarter from 56.5 billion a year earlier, it said
in an exchange filing on Thursday.
The bank reported a 1.48% non-performing loan ratio at the end
of the third quarter, compared with 1.5% at the end of the
previous quarter.
Net interest margin - a key indicator of bank profitability -
was 2.12% at the end of the third quarter, the same as the level
at the end of the second quarter before.
Bank of China, one of the big four state lenders, said in a
recent research note that China's commercial banks are likely to
post quarterly profit growth of about 3% in the June-September
quarter, reflecting a steady recovery from the pandemic.
Most big state lenders recorded their worst ever first-half
performance as the coronavirus pandemic got underway early last
year, before they managed to eke out a small profit increase for
2020 and stabilised further in the first two quarters of 2021.
But the sector will nonetheless come under pressure from
declining loan rates, requirements to set aside more loan-loss
provisions, and challenges faced by non-interest earning
businesses, according to the Bank of China report.
China's banking sector saw its bad-loan ratio rise to 1.87% at
end-September versus 1.86% three months earlier as the impact of
the pandemic lingered, the sector's regulator said.
While China's biggest banks will not give a breakdown of lending
to the property sector in their third-quarter reports, as fears
of contagion from any default by China Evergrande Group have
mounted, some banks, insurers, and shadow banks stopped offering
new credit to property developers, and ran urgent checks on
their exposure to the sector.
(Reporting by Cheng Leng, Zhang Yan and Engen Tham; editing by
Jason Neely)
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