By Hao Zhou/Song Hongmei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-08-28 14:39

The People's Bank of China, or the central bank, announced yesterday that the reform of State-owned commercial banks will go further to enhance their competitiveness.

The central bank urged commercial banks to launch a stock incentive program, according to a document posted on its official website.

According to the document, the program, including staff shareholding and senior supervisors' stock option systems, is part of an effort to deepen the reform on human resources management, with an aim to increase employees' sense of belonging to the company and to attract and retain employees to serve the bank over the long term.

China Construction Bank (CCB) remains the only one of the Big Four State-owned commercial banks that has set a stock incentive plan to allow about 270,000 employees to acquire 800 million of its shares starting July 6.

It was important to introduce qualified overseas strategic investors, which helped in forming modern commercial bank management structure and operating mechanisms, the central bank confirmed while concluding the reform and reshuffle experiences.

Regarding cooperation with foreign investors, the central bank stressed commercial banks bring in advanced management experience and expertise as well as the appropriate financial products, strengthen technical cooperation in areas such as corporate governance, product research and financial innovation to improve their credit analysis and risk management capabilities.

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What's more, while State-owned commercial banks are pursuing reform and cooperation with overseas financial giants, national interests and financial security should be the top concern, said the central bank in the document.

The country began to overhaul its Big Four State-owned commercial banks in 2003. Three of them, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China (BOC) and CCB has completed reform and gone public by October last year.

Earlier this month, Central Huijin, China's State-owned investment company, planned to inject US$40 billion into the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), the only one of the Big Four that remains unlisted as its historical burden is relatively heavier. The injection would mark a major step in ABC's shareholding reform. It would raise ABC's capital adequacy ratio to eight percent, the required ratio for commercial banks in China.

Bank of Communications (BoCom), the country's fifth largest lender, was also successively listed in the A-Share market in Chinese mainland and H-share market in Hong Kong.

The document said financial conditions of these commercial banks are improving. By the end of June, the capital adequacy ratio of ICBC was 13.67 percent, BOC 13.39 percent, CCB 11.34 percent and BoCom 14.17 percent, according to the People's Bank of China.

In terms of net profits, ICBC earned 41.39 billion yuan (US$5.48 billion), BOC 29.54 billion yuan, CCB 34.26 billion yuan and BoCom 8.92 billion yuan.