HONG KONGâ€"The slowing Chinese economy and increasing competition saw profit at the Bank of China, one of the country's biggest lenders, grow at the slowest pace in three years during the second quarter.
Bank of China, the first of the country's big state-owned lenders to report results, said Thursday that net income during the April to June quarter rose to 34.8 billion renminbi ($5.48 billion) up 5.2 percent from a year earlier.
The performance was in line with analysts' forecasts, but the result marked the slowest growth in quarterly profit at the state-owned bank since the first quarter of 2009. For the first six months, profit rose 7.6 percent from a year ago to 71.6 billion renminbi ($11.3 billion).
China's top lenders rank as some of the biggest banks in the world by assets and profits, but they are increasingly competing for a slower growing pool of deposits at home. New measures to partially liberalize China's tightly regulated borrowing and len ding rate regime have also put pressure on the banks' traditional reliance on interest income.
