مباشرة من مؤتمر الأداء | "لا تربح من أرباح سريعة، ولا تركز على كبار العملاء"، صدرت نتائج بنك Zhejiang Commerce لعام 2025، وردت القيادة الجديدة على قضايا مثل فارق الفائدة والمعادن الثمينة والمواضيع الساخنة الأخرى

“Under an industry environment where the net interest margin continues to narrow, competition in the sector intensifies, and risk management faces mounting pressure, we have not blindly pursued a scale mindset, nor have we overly focused on making quick money from short-term performance, nor have we taken the old road of building up large-house accounts. Instead, we have adhered to long-termism—strengthening our foundations, adjusting our structure, enhancing compliance, and controlling risks—achieving overall steady performance.” On March 31, Chen Haiqiang, Chairman of China Merchants Bank (CMB)?? (Zhejiang Merchant Bank), said at the bank’s 2025 annual performance briefing.

At the meeting, the newly appointed leadership team of Zhejiang Merchant Bank responded to hot-button issues such as the performance situation and operating strategies that the market is paying close attention to.

In 2025, Zhejiang Merchant Bank recorded operating income of 62.51B yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders of 12.93B yuan, both declining year-on-year. By the end of 2025, the bank’s total assets were 3.48 trillion yuan, up 4.68% from the end of the previous year; its non-performing loan ratio was 1.36%, down 0.02 percentage points from the end of the previous year.

The decline in the net interest margin is clearly narrowing, but short-term pressure still remains

In 2025, Zhejiang Merchant Bank’s net interest margin was 1.6%, down 11 basis points year-on-year. “Compared with the decreases of 20 basis points in 2023 and 30 basis points in 2024, the narrowing in the net interest margin decline is clearly evident.” said Lü Linhua (to be appointed), President of Zhejiang Merchant Bank.

Cutting the deposit interest expense ratio is an important measure for banks to ease pressure on the net interest margin. In 2025, Zhejiang Merchant Bank’s deposit interest expense ratio declined by 32 basis points year-on-year. When responding to questions about the development of corporate banking business, Luo Feng, Vice President of Zhejiang Merchant Bank, mentioned that by the end of 2025, the bank’s corporate deposit interest expense ratio was reduced to 1.61%, down nearly 35 basis points from the beginning of that year.

As for the question of whether maturing deposits will be lost, Luo Feng said that in 2025, some existing time deposits of the bank matured; the overall funds retention rate remained at a high level, and the vast majority of the maturing funds still stayed within the system. The reporter noted that by the end of 2025, corporate deposits accounted for more than 78% of the bank’s total deposits.

At the performance briefing, Lü Linhua elaborated in detail on the measures the bank has taken to cope with the narrowing of the net interest margin from the asset side: first, strengthen pricing management for customers and control the trend of asset placement prices falling too quickly; second, continue to manage the net interest margin throughout the process, establishing a full-process management mechanism from expectation, decomposition, monitoring to evaluation; third, optimize the structure, revitalize existing assets, actively clear out ineffective and low-efficiency assets, and this year the identification criteria for low-efficiency assets are even stricter.

When talking about the outlook for the net interest margin, Lü Linhua believes that each bank’s asset-liability structure and its own repricing cycle differ, leading to different net interest margin performance and operating patterns. Some of the high-yield assets that Zhejiang Merchant Bank previously deployed have been gradually exited; meanwhile, under the “low risk, equal returns” strategy, the yield on newly deployed assets has declined, and in the short term the net interest margin still faces pressure. However, judging from some measures already taken for the future and at present, the bank believes that in the future the net interest margin in the banking industry can gradually stabilize.

The previous year’s fund-related business dragged down non-interest income; efforts to develop light-asset, high-stickiness fee-income business

In 2025, Zhejiang Merchant Bank’s operating income and net profit attributable to shareholders decreased by 7.6% and 14.8% year-on-year, respectively. Lü Linhua said that this was mainly affected by two factors:

First, for interest income, the current economy is still in a weak recovery state. Effective credit demand is gradually recovering, the trend of the banking industry’s net interest margin continuing to narrow persists, and Zhejiang Merchant Bank’s net interest margin trend overall remains consistent with the industry.

Second, for non-interest income, compared with the one-way market in 2024, in 2025 the bond market saw wide-range fluctuations and increased volatility, which significantly affected the returns on trading financial assets. In 2025, the bank’s net non-interest income decline was close to 20%.

Judging from the financial report data, losses from fair value changes are the main drag on other non-interest income.

When responding to questions related to the gold market business, Jing Feng, Vice President of Zhejiang Merchant Bank, provided more information. “A big portion with a large year-on-year decline is fund-related business, which is consistent with the trend across the whole market. On the one hand, absolute return yields contracted sharply; on the other hand, by the end of 2024 there were large unrealized fair value gains on the books. Compared with that, the bottom positions of traditional holdings turned into a small amount of unrealized loss by the end of 2025, so with ‘buy in and sell out’—the biggest variable is here.”

Jing Feng also noted that if we look at the specific structure of gold market business, traditional bond business still recorded excess returns last year through building a research and investment system and conducting band-trading. Contributions increased year-on-year. Other areas such as foreign exchange also maintained good profitability. He believes that in 2026, global interest rate levels and asset price performance will carry even greater uncertainty. “Against this backdrop, we will take a relatively prudent stance in investing in various types of assets, and at the same time we will make corresponding contingency plans and response measures.”

Regarding the 2026 operating outlook, Lü Linhua said, “In terms of operating revenue in 2026, we still need to make a great push to work on both the asset and liability sides. We must do everything possible to stabilize the net interest margin. On that basis, we also need to increase the sources of fee income to ensure that our operating revenue remains robust and sustainable. In addition, on the profit side, we need to continue pushing comprehensive cost controls, keep a tight grip on daily spending, and make sure to squeeze out unnecessary parts of costs.”

Lü Linhua further explained the “enhancing fee-income sources” by saying that Zhejiang Merchant Bank is advancing a three-year action plan to improve fee income. “In this process, we have a consideration: we need to change the past phenomenon of relying on asset placement and credit expansion to drive the improvement of fee income. We need to work hard to develop settlement, agency sales, custody and other light-asset, high-stickiness fee-income businesses. At the same time, we will strengthen fee-and-spending linkage, make sure we account properly for the spending behind every piece of fee income, so as to optimize the structure and increase the overall level of fee income.”

“A big variable from last year”: the volume of precious-metals trading expanded 8-fold versus the previous year

Since last year, gold prices have been fluctuating at high levels, drawing extensive market attention, which has also brought greater attention to banks’ precious-metals business.

When responding to questions related to the gold market business, Jing Feng said precious metals are “a big variable from last year,” and provided a detailed explanation of this segment.

He said that while maintaining the advantages of hedging trading, last year Zhejiang Merchant Bank introduced a quantitative factor model based on both traditional fundamental and technical analysis, to expand and strengthen directional trading. In 2025, the gold market showed a one-way upward trend. The bank firmly captured this hot rally; the full-year volume of precious-metals trading expanded 8 times compared with 2024, and the market’s heat has continued to persist since the first quarter of 2026.

It is worth mentioning that since the beginning of the year, the gold price has experienced several bouts of intense volatility. In Jing Feng’s view, “This was also a very good pressure test and an assessment of our ability to respond.”

He believes that with volatility increasing, it is not excluded that gold and some other individual metals may present phased opportunities in 2026. Zhejiang Merchant Bank will enhance its overall service capabilities for precious-metals business from two dimensions.

On the one hand, deepen the core capabilities of the proprietary market-making business, and build a profit-growth mechanism. “The trading capabilities we have accumulated in precious-metals markets are the underlying capabilities that allow us to do lead generation and conversion through internet channels and provide services tailored to specific needs.” he said. “We will continuously improve an integrated research-and-trading system, iterate the quantitative factor models, enhance our ability to respond quickly to the market, and precisely capture structural opportunities.”

On the other hand, optimize the ecological layout of client business and empower the bank’s overall client operations. Guided by customer needs, we will continuously enrich product systems such as allocated gold accounts, physical precious metals, precious-metals leasing, and client-delegated transactions, to promote functional iteration of products and improvement of system service capabilities. At the same time, focusing on the real economy’s needs, we will deepen the “one enterprise, one policy” service model, providing customized, comprehensive financial service solutions for customers across the entire precious-metals industry chain.

Cover image source: 刘嘉魁