Tripled in 5 years, Industrial Bank's second curve

In 2025, the banking industry remains in an adjustment phase marked by narrowing interest spreads, slow demand recovery, and ongoing risk cleanup, with overall operating pressure not easing. In a complex economic environment, the annual reports of banks that have been released one after another show different structures, as each bank works to fill gaps and look for new growth curves.

The new growth curve for Industrial Bank is driven mainly by technology finance. In 2025, Industrial Bank’s technology finance loan balance reached 1.12 trillion yuan, ranking first among joint-stock banks, and the implementation of the AIC license has made the linkage between investment and lending even smoother.

Industrial Bank’s asset size has stepped onto a new plateau of over 11 trillion yuan, with total loan volume approaching 6 trillion yuan. Corporate business has maintained relatively fast growth for consecutive years and has become the core force supporting credit deployment, while retail and credit card businesses have taken the initiative to contract, decreasing by 1.36% and 10.97% year-on-year, respectively.

In terms of performance, in 2025 revenue was 212.741 billion yuan and net profit was 77.469 billion yuan, both representing slight increases; through liability optimization and a faster pace of fee income, the fundamentals of profitability were stabilized, with net fee and commission income increasing by 7.45%; overseas segments maintained high-speed growth, with revenue and profit increasing by 46.39% and 49.22%, respectively.

01

Pursuing progress in technology finance

Technology finance, which has been a key focus of Industrial Bank in recent years, is the first of its “Four Business Cards,” and the results of its development are gradually becoming evident.

As of the end of 2025, the bank’s technology finance loan balance was 1.12 trillion yuan, ranking first among joint-stock banks, with year-on-year growth of 18.47%; during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, technology finance loans increased by more than 3 times, while the non-performing rate was only 0.85%, lower than the average level for corporate finance loans.

The service coverage of Industrial Bank’s technology finance is also continuously expanding. As of September 2025, it had served nearly 1,500 Shanghai Stock Exchange Main Board and STAR Market enterprises, cumulatively providing nearly 70 billion yuan in financing; by the end of 2025, it served 365,000 technology enterprises, with financing in technology-related industries exceeding 2 trillion yuan, up 15.98% year-on-year.

From a business model perspective, Industrial Bank has formed a technology finance service system featuring specialized operations plus innovative quantitative evaluation, along with full-cycle comprehensive finance.

On the one hand, the bank has built a specialized framework consisting of a Technology Finance Leadership Group at the head office, 20 key branches, and 150 technology branches, with supporting differentiated authorization, credit granting, performance assessment, and due diligence plus liability exemption mechanisms, and it has innovated a “technology flow” evaluation model, using R&D, intellectual property, technology innovation qualifications, and government awards and subsidies as core credit-granting bases. The cumulative approved amount reached 1.15 trillion yuan.

Among them, Chongqing Branch launched a special financing program for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements geared toward the “laboratory economy,” becoming the first joint-stock commercial bank to cooperate with four provincial-level laboratories locally. It served 14 laboratory customers and provided 127 million yuan in credit, effectively supporting the industrialization of hard-tech projects such as chips and new energy.

On the other hand, Industrial Bank obtained the country’s first AIC (Financial Asset Investment Company) license among joint-stock banks. Based on commercial banking services, it adds investment-banking tools such as bond underwriting, M&A financing, equity investments, and syndicated loans to enhance both service coverage and professionalism. During the reporting period, Industrial Bank’s M&A financing deployment increased by 25.26% year-on-year, syndicated loan deployment increased by 12.17% year-on-year, and its capital market business deployment was 50.982 billion yuan.

For example, Suzhou Branch provided an integrated cross-border M&A financing solution in both foreign and local currencies and an exchange-rate risk-hedging solution for a certain leading electronic-industry enterprise’s $680 million cross-border M&A, and the deal resulted in financing of HKD 780.3 million (7.803 billion HKD). Fuzhou Branch focused on the optoelectronics industry, set up 5 optoelectronics-feature branches, served 176 enterprises, and provided 2.754 billion yuan in financing balance, forming a regional characteristic industrial finance model that can be replicated.

Notably, Industrial Bank issued its first tranche of 10 billion yuan in sci-tech innovation bonds and strengthened its underwriting efforts for sci-tech innovation bonds. In 2025, the scale of sci-tech innovation bonds underwritten exceeded 300 billion yuan, up more than 150% year-on-year; in the first quarter of 2026, it was about 108 billion yuan, which is 3.7 times the amount in the same period of the previous year.

Building on this, in March 2026, Industrial Bank launched “Xinghuo Technology,” a technology-finance-dedicated service system, further strengthening the evaluation and credit granting mechanism centered on “technology flow.” Focusing on different stages of technology enterprises—startup stage, growth stage, and mature stage—it established a full-spectrum service system covering “equity, bonds, loans, guarantees, and leasing.”

02

Seeking changes in revenue structure

During the reporting period, Industrial Bank’s revenue and net profit increased slightly. Net interest income was 148.752 billion yuan, with only a 0.44% year-on-year increase; however, net income from fees and commissions grew by 7.45% against the trend, significantly outperforming the overall revenue growth rate, and became the core driving force for profit growth.

Under the pressure of a year-on-year decline of 11 basis points in the net interest margin to 1.71%, Industrial Bank is gradually getting rid of excessive reliance on traditional credit interest and accelerating its transition toward light-capital operations. Behind this are coordinated efforts across “big investment banking, big asset management, and big wealth management”:

In investment banking, mainly contributed by businesses such as bond underwriting, financial advisory services, and asset securitization, the bank’s large investment banking FPA reached 4.89 trillion yuan in 2025, up 8.13% year-on-year.

In asset management, the combined assets under management of five subsidiaries—Xingyin Wealth Management, Xingyin Funds, Xingyin Trust, Xingyin Futures, and Xingyin Leasing—totaled 3.65 trillion yuan, up 26.07% year-on-year.

In wealth management, retail wealth management fee income was 5.561 billion yuan, up 19.22%. Meanwhile, relying on the YinYin platform, the bank’s asset management products have covered thousands of small and medium-sized banks nationwide, with wealth sales balances approaching the 1 trillion yuan threshold.

At the 2026 work conference, Industrial Bank explicitly put forward the work principle of “fully expanding assets, strengthening liabilities, stabilizing interest margins, and increasing middle and fee income,” showing its determination to optimize its revenue structure and deepen its focus on the light-capital track.

03

Stability in asset quality

As of the end of 2025, Industrial Bank’s total assets were 11.09 trillion yuan, up 5.58% year-on-year, having crossed the 8-, 9-, 10-, and 11-trillion-yuan thresholds for four consecutive years. Total loans were 5.95 trillion yuan, up 3.7%, maintaining steady expansion.

From a business perspective, corporate business is the main growth driver. In recent years, Industrial Bank’s corporate (i.e., corporate) loans have continued to maintain high growth rates of 8%–20%, becoming the ballast for credit expansion; while retail loan growth has long hovered at a low level, and in 2025 it further contracted, forming a clear “scissor gap” relative to corporate.

Table 1: Growth rates of Industrial Bank’s corporate and retail loans (2023–2025)

Data source: Company financial reports; compiled by Zero One Think Tank

The structural changes in 2025 are even more clear. Corporate-loan growth was 8.66%, significantly higher than the bank-wide average loan growth rate; retail loans (excluding credit cards) declined by 1.36% year-on-year for the first time, turning negative; credit card loan balance was 330.885 billion yuan, contracting sharply by 10.97% year-on-year.

The combined pressures of an economic downturn and credit card risk exposure are the main motivations for banks to increase their focus on corporate business. Against the backdrop of incomplete recovery in residents’ consumption and credit demand, reducing retail credit card assets characterized by high volatility and high capital occupation allows resources to be concentrated on high-quality corporate sectors such as real manufacturing, green initiatives, and technology. This not only reduces overall risk exposure but also improves unit-capital return efficiency. “Making up for price with quantity” thus becomes the bank’s core operating strategy.

With the trend of increasing corporate business, overall asset quality remains controllable. Industrial Bank’s overall non-performing loan ratio at year-end was 1.08%, a slight increase of 0.01 percentage points from the end of 2024, mainly due to more prudent risk classification for some real-estate projects.

Among them, the non-performing rate for corporate loans was 1.01%, staying level with the beginning of the year; the non-performing rate for retail loans was 0.88%, remaining at a relatively good level in the industry. While actively reducing scale by 10.97%, the non-performing rate of credit cards fell to 3.34%, down 0.29 percentage points year-on-year, and the delinquency rate also fell by 0.08 percentage points.

Table 2: Credit card balances and non-performing rates of listed joint-stock banks (part)

Data source: Company financial reports; compiled by Zero One Think Tank

At the performance briefing, Chairman Lü Jiajin also said that risks in key areas had clearly converged, with year-on-year declines in newly occurred non-performing loans in three major segments—real estate, local government financing platforms, and credit cards—of 42%, 31%, and 13%, respectively.

In addition, Industrial Bank’s capital adequacy ratio was 13.56%, its core Tier 1 capital adequacy ratio was 9.70%, and its provision coverage ratio was 228.41%, up 9.58 percentage points from the previous year, indicating a relatively solid capital and provisioning foundation.

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