In 3rd Capital Outstanding China Enterprise Award organized by Capital Publications, China Construction Bank was awarded as the “Best Retail Bank in China” and was the only domestic bank to be awarded in this category.

Retail banking is one of the key areas of our strategic transformation. In 2007, the Board of Director had revised the development strategy framework, clearly laying out the goals and direction of the development of retail business and thus achieving significant growth in revenue contribution. The proportion of profit before tax of personal banking service reported a growth of from 16.21% of the previous year to 25.93%. The personal loan service showed a 23.71% growth to RMB$723.805 billion, accounting for 22.12% of gross loans and advances to customers, an increase of 1.76 percentage points. In 2007, the Bank acted as a sales agent for 233 funds with a sales volume of 772.751 billion, the service charge is accounting for 37.51% of the group’s service charge. Sound results were achieved in our bank card business: spending through debit cards increased by 91.73% to RMB 407.416 billion; the number of credit cards issued grew by 98.75% to 12.6042 million and the total spending through credit cards increased by 94.39% to RMB78.664 billion.

The Bank rolled out retail branch transformation with Bank of America, across the Bank with a view to providing standard sales modes for branches. By the end of May 2008, over 7300 retail branches had undergone functional transformation across the Bank. Daily average sales volume at the transformed branches was 2.15 times of that before transformation. The waiting time dropped by 29%.

While the Bank was carrying branch expansion across the Bank, we were also putting efforts to establish professional sales institutions such as personal finance centres and wealth management centres, forming multi-layers service structure to provide differentiated and personal services for different target customers. In 2007, the Bank opened 741 personal finance centres and 74 wealth management centres to provide high-end customers with private banking services including cash management, property purchase, investment trust, equity arrangement, as well as tax planning and children’s education.

The Bank achieved a dual goal of controlling the amount of personal loans and optimizing the loan structure during 2007. The amount of personal loans as at the end of 2007 was 723.805 billion, representing an increase of 138.72 billion, of which personal mortgage increased by 23.33% or 99.849 billion when compared to last year, maintaining a leading position in mortgage.

Capital Magazine, headquartered in Hong Kong, is one of the famous financial media in the Asia Pacific Region, mainly focusing on several sectors such as financial reporting, corporate governance, business commentary and personal interviews. The magazine has consecutively held “Capital Outstanding China Enterprise Award” and it comes to the third year. The judge panel of this year, which was formed by famous politicians, enterprises and magazine editorials, made the judgment based on several criteria including corporate overall performance, fame, corporate governance, operation management, market position and result announcement. All results were audited by Chak and Associates, Solicitors. 

Guests including Mr. Lam Sui-lung, HKSAR Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs, Mr. Wu King-Cheong, Vice President of The Chinese General Chamber of Commerce and Mr. Fung Wing-Yip, president of Hong Kong Productivity Council were invited to attend the ceremony of “Capital Outstanding China Enterprise Award”. At the same time, apart from the Bank, other famous enterprises such as China Telecom Corporation Ltd, PetroChina Company Ltd, China Everbright Holdings Ltd, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. were awarded.