The Banker Magazine of UK celebrated The Banker Awards 2005 on September 7 in London. China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) was awarded the Best Bank in China for 2005 and is the only chosen bank with this award among China’s banks for this year

For 80 years since its inception in 1926, The Banker has been a trusted source of global financial intelligence and given its exclusive bank listings and extensive financial coverage. It is uniquely placed to bring its international perspective to its global banking awards. In 2000, The Banker started to give 124 awards of the year including global bank of the year, bank of the year, technology awards, investment awards and country awards. This year The Banker Awards covered 508 banks from 133 countries and regions。

When The Banker declared the awards of the best bank of the year 2005, its comments on CCB are as follows: In 2004 when CCB was incorporated into a shareholding bank, the profit of the year increased 116% and ROE was 25.40%. CCB’s strength is the soundness and stability of its business growth, the improvement of loan portfolio, and the development of its intermediary services. CCB NPL ratio reduced to 3.92% by way of introducing best risk management practices. CCB proactively developed new brands, improved brand awareness, and increased the share in the targeted client market. CCB pushed forward the establishment of data consolidation through the input in IT. And meanwhile, CCB developed new initiatives to enhance the efficiency of decision-making process, strengthen the customers relations management and assets and liabilities management. CCB’s new image will surely enable its establishment of modern corporate governance structure.

The Banker magazine said, CCB has integrated into the capital market step by step by way of introducing strategic investors. CCB has demonstrated its continuing capacity of product innovation, e.g. launched the wealth investment of Happy Investor and foreign currency structured product brand. CCB has always maintained the leading position in terms of loans in infrastructure construction, housing mortgage loans and bank cards. 

In recent years, CCB has always been committed to the customer-focused and market-oriented concept. CCB has strengthened marketing and promotion, improved brand creation and building, and attached great importance to the targeted clients with development potential and industries and regions with rapid growth, to consolidate the advantages in long and medium-term credit and house mortgage loans and maintain the continuous rapid expansion in the intermediary services. CCB has also took greater efforts in IT input to push forward the data consolidation of core business and develop various systems to support decision-making process, customer relations management, business operation, risk management, etc. On the other hand, CCB has intensified the creation and innovation of financial products and services. For instance, CCB, as the pilot bank, issued Happy Investor wealth management card, and launched the foreign currency structured product of Profit from Exchange throughout the whole bank. CCB became the first domestic bank to introduce the independent depository system of deposit bank for securities clients. By the end of 2004, CCB’s capital adequacy ratio had reached 11.29%, NPL ratio 3.92%, and the KPI could compete with the largest 100 banks in the international market.

CCB winning this award is a must. It has always been devoted itself to business exploration, products innovation, mechanism transformation, financial management, risk management and internal control for many years and scored substantial achievements. And its all operation indices rank the leading position among domestic banks. Meanwhile, it has already established an advanced corporate governance structure through shareholding restructuring program. In particular after CCB became the first state-owned bank to introduce strategic investors, it took further step to intensify its shareholding reshuffle program to improve management and core competitiveness.