China added 1.11 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year to its balance of credit card bad debts, statistics by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, showed yesterday.
The bad-debt ratio rose by 0.4 percentage points from the previous quarter to 3.5 percent.
In the first quarter, Chinese banks extended 1.48 trillion yuan in credit card debts, up 42.9 percent from a year earlier. That was 116 billion yuan more than three months earlier, or an increase of 8.5 percent.
Credit card debts outstanding at the end of the first quarter hit 248.58 billion yuan, up 49.9 percent year-on-year. That was 2.83 billion yuan, or 1.1 percent higher than the previous quarter.
Bad debts were expanding as well. In the first quarter, the balance of credit card payments overdue for more than six months reached 8.8 billion yuan, an increase of 1.1 billion yuan, or 14.4 percent, over the previous quarter. That was 3.5 percent of the total credit card debts outstanding, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from the fourth quarter in 2009.
Against the backdrop of the financial crisis, China's credit card bad-debt ratio surged since 2009. It stood at 3 percent in the first quarter of 2009, rose to 3.3 percent in the third quarter last year, and decreased slightly to 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter, but rose again in the first quarter of 2010 to 3.5 percent.
