The bank projects to raise its yearly pre-tax profit by 32 percent to 2.2 trillion VND for 2017, and targets a 16-per cent rise in the total assets, credit growth and capital mobilization and a bad debt ratio of below 2 per cent. In the first quarter of 2017, it earned a pre-tax profit of 595 billion VND.
The Asia Commercial Bank (ACB) holding its annual shareholders meeting on April 10
ACB will pay a 10-percent dividend for last year’s performance by shares. Besides, the bank plans to extract 100 billion VND from the 2017-projected profit to buy back shares.
It also hopes to complete the handling of bad debts caused by six companies of former banking tycoon Nguyen Duc Kien by the end of this year.
Kien, who was the former co-founder of the bank and one of the top bankers in Vietnam, was sentenced to 30 years in jail in 2014 for fraud, tax evasion, illegal trade and deliberate misdeeds resulting in serious consequences.
The bad loans of some companies run by Kien totalled nearly 5.8 trillion VND (257.8 million USD) as of December 31, 2015.
ACB plans to finish collecting all the bad debts from those six firms by 2018, according to the plan that was approved by the State Bank of Vietnam in 2015.
Under the previous plan, ACB planned to collect the debts over four years, starting from 2015, at a rate of 814 billion VND, 2.2 trillion VND, 1.8 trillion VND and 1 trillion VND.
But ACB General Director Do Minh Toan said that the collection was ahead of schedule, with 3 trillion VND collected from those companies in 2016.
With the current progress, Toan hoped that the bank will be able to complete handling all of the bad debts caused by the six companies this year.
In 2016, ACB recorded a post-tax profit of 1.66 trillion VND, an increase of 27 percent from 2015. The bank also recorded returns on total assets (ROA) and returns on total equity (ROE) of 0.61 percent and 9.87 percent.
On December 31, 2016, the bank recorded total assets of 234 trillion VND, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent, and a bad debt of 0.88 percent, down from 1.3 percent at the end of 2015.
Source: VNA