(China) – China Construction Bank, one of China’s main publicly owned banks, is to speed up its bad loan clean-up in advance of its planned share market listing.China Construction, which aims to become the first State owned bank to list on mainland share markets, has around US$32.3 billion in non-performing loans still on its books after transferring US$30 billion in loans to an asset management company set up for the purpose in 1999.
The current bad loan ratio is more than 15 percent of all outstanding loans.
Yang Xiaoyang, the bank’s President, says the bank aims to reduce this ratio to less than 10 percent within two years.