The Agricultural Bank of China, the last of the country's Big Four lenders to be reformed, reported a 64.55 percent growth in operating profit for the first half of the year.

Operating profits totaled 42.34 billion yuan in the first six months, an increase of 16.61 billion yuan from a year ago, the bank said.

The growth has mainly been boosted by increasing loan demand and rapid development of its intermediary services.

Outstanding loans expanded by 252.9 billion yuan from the beginning of the year to reach 3.38 trillion yuan at the end of June, 4.4 billion yuan more than the growth in the first half of 2006.

Fee income from intermediary services had a year-on-year growth of 52.63 percent to reach 8.7 billion yuan during the period, 4.93 percentage points higher than the growth rate a year ago.

Fee income accounted for 10.82 percent of the bank's total income, 0.7 of a percentage point higher from a year earlier, the bank said.

"The improved results are good signs for the bank, the weakest of the Big Four," said Zhao Xijun, a professor at Renmin University of China.

However, the figures are not comparable with that of the other three, which have completed restructuring and listed on the stock markets before October, Zhao said.

The Agricultural Bank is still waiting for a detailed plan from the central government to make a substantial move in its restructuring process that is likely to be long and difficult.

"Much more needs to be done in its restructuring process that finally will lead to a public listing, though its performance has improved somewhat in the past two years," said Zhang Qi, an analyst at Haitong Securities.

The bank's non-performing loans fell 8.4 billion yuan in the first half from 736 billion yuan at the end of 2006, reducing its NPL ratio by 2.09 percentage points from 23.55 percent. But it has to cut the bad loan ratio to less than 5 percent in line with regulatory requirements.

The bank also needs to set aside assets to cover more than 60 percent of the bad loans, up from just 4.6 percent at the end of 2006.

"A capital injection from the government and peeling off its bad assets generated over time is necessary," Zhang said.

It's widely believed the capital the Agricultural Bank needs will be bigger than what the other three need, as it is the worst hit by massive lending to the rural sector. The bank has about 300 billion yuan in bad assets generated by lending to meet government policies.

(China Daily August 8, 2007)