The 2008 Competitiveness Rankings of Asian Banks were announced in Beijing on November 30, 2008. With its outstanding profitability, the Industrial Bank claimed the prize for the Best Bank in Mainland China for ROE, thus topping the chart of Chinese banks for a second year in terms of ROE.
The 2008 Competitiveness Rankings of Asian Banks was sponsored by 21st Century Business Herald, with the Faculty of Business Administration of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University as the entrusted parties. Information on 128 Asian banks was acquired from the authoritative Bankscope database for the evaluation. Specifically, a total of 24 individual indicators were taken into account during the evaluation process, making it one of the most authoritative appraisals of the competitiveness of Banks in Asia.
Among the Asian banks sampled in the evaluation, IB ranked 4th with an average 30-month ROE of 30.24%. From 2005 to 2007, the Industrial Bank achieved compound growth rates of 36% and 87% for total assets and net profit respectively. Challenged by a complicated and changing macroeconomic environment in 2008, the Industrial Bank has relied on prudent and scientific decision making and pro-active fine-tuning to ensure stable operation. As a result, a sound trend of growth was maintained throughout the first three quarters of the year with net profits reaching RMB 9.4 billion Yuan, marking a 56% growth over the same period of the previous year. Moreover, the asset quality of the Bank remained sound throughout the year. At the end of September, the Bank's non-performing loan ratio was a mere 1.06%, which is 0.09 percent lower than the ratio at the beginning of the year.