Asset quality of lenders stable, says CBIRC official

The asset quality of the Chinese banking sector will remain generally stable this year, an official of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said on Friday.

"China's economy stabilized in the first quarter of 2019, better than expected, and will hopefully achieve stable growth for the whole year... The banking sector will continue to step up the efforts to dispose of nonperforming loans and will keep pressing ahead risk prevention and control in key areas," said Liu Zhiqing, deputy director-general of the statistics IT and risk surveillance department of the CBIRC, the country's top banking and insurance regulator.

Since 2017, the Chinese banking sector has disposed of nonperforming loans totaling 3.85 trillion yuan ($565 billion). As the volume of NPL formation is roughly the same as that of NPL disposal, the NPL ratio has basically remained stable, Liu said.