Commercial banks have reported satisfactory profit for the first half of the year and they keep optimistic about the operation in the second half of the year.

Experts said that banks’ satisfactory profit in the first six months of the year is not a surprise at all. They said the business environment in the first half of the year was good, and this created the most favorable conditions for banks to reap profit.

The national economy has been recovering well after the global economic crisis. Most of the economic sectors have obtained high economic growth rate over the last time, while the economic growth rate in the first six months of the year reached 6.16 percent in comparison with the same period of the last year. The high growth rate shows that Vietnam’s economy has been recovering rapidly and that Vietnam’s economy will still gain high growth rate in the time to come.

Meanwhile, the State Bank of Vietnam has made proper instructions for the operation of commercial banks. It has been taking necessary moves to expand credit at a reasonable rate, to decrease the interest rates to reasonable levels, and to ensure the liquidity for the national economy.

Pham Quoc Thanh, Deputy Director of ABBank, said that if there are not big changes in the upcoming six months, the profit of commercial banks in the third quarter of the year will increase stably, and it is highly possible that big banks will fulfill the yearly business plan sooner than expected. Credit is still expected to bring the main income to commercial banks.

In the first half of the year, the pretax profit of ABBank was 354 billion dong, which means that the bank has fulfilled 64 percent of the yearly business plan. Of this amount, the profit from credit activities accounted for 39 percent.

By the end of June 2010, the outstanding loans of the bank had reached 15,219 billion dong, an increase of 77 percent in comparison with the same period of the last year.

Meanwhile, Maritime Bank has reported the profit of 660 billion dong, fulfilling 55 percent of the yearly business plan. The credit activities have brought 25 percent of the total profit of the bank.

Also in the first six months of the year, Eximbank got 930 billion dong worth of pretax profit, while it plans to obtain the profit of 2200 billion in the whole year 2010.

The State Bank of Vietnam has decided that in 2010, the total credit growth rate will be 25 percent. Meanwhile, in the first six months of the year, the credit growth rate was only 10.52 percent, meaning banks will still have room to expand their loaning activities.

In 2009, income from lending activities accounted for 40-60 percent of the total incomes of big commercial banks. As for smaller joint-stock banks, the proportion was 70-90 percent of the total income.

In general, credit is the main source of income of banks, and the low income from credit has made the profit of many banks lower than expected. Therefore, experts say, banks will try to expand credit in the last six months of the year.

In order to obtain the credit growth rate of 25 percent as planned, banks will need to obtain the monthly credit growth rate of 2.5 percent. In order to attract more borrowers, banks will have to continue lowering lending interest rates.