Our Advantages

In 2022, facing the complex and severe external environment, the Bank fully and faithfully applied the new development philosophy on all fronts, and acted on the general working principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability.We took proactive actions to overcome difficulties and promoted our own high-quality development while serving the new pattern of development. As a result, we delivered an operating performance that improves quality whilst ensuring stability.

The core indicators about the “Strong, Excellent and Large” orientation of development continued to improve. The Bank maintained its position among top large global banks in terms of assets and profit. In terms of being “Strong”, the Bank’s capital adequacy ratio rose to 19.26% and allowance to NPLs registered 209.47%, maintaining at a sound level. The balance of asset allowance was nearly RMB800.0 billion, indicating stronger risk resistance. NPL ratio decreased to 1.38%, marking the eighth consecutive quarterly decrease. In terms of being “Excellent”, return on average total assets (“ROA”) stood at 0.97% and return on weighted average equity (“ROE”) stood at 11.43%. Net interest margin (“NIM”) recorded 1.92%, indicating more profit concessions for the real economy and maintaining at a reasonable range. In terms of being “Large”, total assets rose by 12.6% to RMB39.6 trillion, operating income was RMB841.4 billion, and net profit increased by 3.1% and reached a new record high of RMB361.0 billion. The foregoing performance results have fully reflected an overall balance in value creation, market position, risk control and capital constraint and again demonstrated the Bank’s stable operation feature and strong development resilience as well as great potential for growth in future.

These results were mainly attributed to the Bank’s efforts on pursuing “stability, progress and reform”.

“Stability” means effectively ensuring overall economic stability by serving policies and measures to stabilize the economy and effectively controlling risks. Always keeping in mind the top priorities of the country, we placed our focus of operation on serving the real economy and implemented a full range of policies and follow-up measures to stabilize the economy. Through instruments such as loans, bonds, leasing, and debt-for-equity swaps, we provided a total of over RMB6.4 trillion funds of all types to the real economy. RMB denominated loans of domestic branches increased by RMB2.6 trillion, representing a year-on-year increase of RMB428.3 billion. While maintaining a reasonable growth in volume, we continued to adjust and optimize the structure to make our financial services more adaptable, competitive and inclusive. The Bank maintained the lead in terms of the size of loans to manufacturing, green industries, and sci-tech innovations, and the growth rate of loans for key areas such as inclusive and agriculture-related areas was significantly higher than the growth of total loans. We innovated in supply of financial services and optimized the payment environment, which helped improve the quality and expand the scale of consumption. We intensified support to ensure stable performance in foreign trade and foreign investment and actively served high-standard opening up and the high-quality development of the Belt and Road.

Risk is the biggest variable in business. The Bank adheres to the coordinated development and security, and earnestly implements arrangements to prevent and resolve major economic and financial risks, and adjusts risk prevention and control strategies based on the circumstances. Our asset quality is stable overall and all types of risks are generally under control. We advanced the Five-pronged Risk Management Approach in depth, strengthened the bonding force of the three lines of defense, and upgraded the enterprise-wide risk management system. We refined the system of new rules and regulations on credit approval, enriched the application of intelligent risk control, and focused on improving risk governance in key areas and key large accounts. We enhanced joint control of market risks, which effectively responded to fluctuations in global financial markets. We actively share risk control technologies and tools with over 300 peers, thereby helping them to maintain financial stability

“Progress” means continuing to strengthen the foundation of high-quality development by promoting implementation of plans and basic projects. We revised the strategic plan for the development of the Group to effectively align with the national 14th Five-Year Plan. We adhered to the combination of overall advancement and breakthrough-making in key areas, and accelerated the implementation of the strategic layout of “leveraging our strengths, tackling areas of weaknesses and solidifying the foundation”. The leading strengths of business segments such as corporate finance, settlement finance, institutional finance and financial markets were consolidated. New achievements were made in strategic focuses including personal finance, foreign exchange business, key areas and urban-rural collaboration and some potential segments have been growing into new growth drivers. Personal financial assets maintained the leading position in terms of scale; international settlement, cross-border RMB settlement, and foreign exchange sale and settlement saw their business value increase by about 5%, and the ICBC Xingnongtong APP covered over 1,800 counties in the year of launch.

We continued our efforts in basic work and in areas that are good for long-term development. Based on our strength in customer base and interactions among government, business and consumer (GBC), we continued to implement basic projects including Net Making and Patching, fund retention, urban-rural collaboration, agency business, merchant marketing, etc. and sped up the formation of the customer ecosystem with coordinated development of micro, small, medium and large enterprises and personal customers. At the end of 2022, corporate customers, cash settlement accounts and merchants all exceeded 10 million, and the number of personal customers increased by 16.72 million to 720 million. The synergistic effect became more apparent, and a record high in annual increase in customer deposits exceeding RMB3.4 trillion was set.

“Reform” means constantly energizing growth drive through reform, innovation and digitalization. We take reforms as the fundamental driving force and innovation as the first of such driving force, formulated and implemented the comprehensive reform plan, and accelerated connotative development. We deepened mechanisms innovation. We refined the supervision and assessment system, optimized the competitiveness evaluation indicator system, improved the green finance management mechanism, enhanced ESG management efficiency, and boosted the balanced, coordinated, sustainable high-quality development state. We deepened innovation in services, launching series service solutions for new urban residents, rolling out the first personal pension savings product, and continued to expand high-frequency service scenarios concerning people’s livelihood such as government affairs, medical and pension. We also deepened innovation in channels. We accelerated the building of “Cloud ICBC”, strengthened online and offline integrated operations, enriched functions of “ICBC Sharing Stations” for the benefit of the people, and continued to improve outlets’ competitiveness and customer satisfaction.

We took digitalization as a new driver of growth. We sped up the development of D-ICBC, promoted digital upgrading of businesses, products and services, and continued to cultivate new growth engines. We launched Mobile Banking 8.0 and ICBC e Life 5.0 and established an open wealth community. The number of mobile banking personal customers reached 516 million and monthly active users on the mobile end exceeded 174 million, both ranking first in the industry. We upgraded the ECOS and intensified efforts to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies of key areas, further consolidating the technical foundation. The Bank ranked first among domestic banks in terms of new and cumulative numbers of patents granted in the year, and comprehensive technological strength continued to lead the industry