BEIJING - Commerzbank, Germany's second-largest lender, announced on Monday ambitious plans with a cross-border focus for corporate customer business with China and Asia.
It expected its corporate banking business volume in the world's second-largest economy to increase by 20 percent this year alone, twice as high as that for Asia as a whole, said Michael Kotzbauer, an Asian region board member of the bank at a press conference in Beijing.
The bank will target German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that do business in China, and serve Chinese firms looking to do business in Germany with products ranging from loans and cash management to hedging products and consulting on purchasing companies.
"We would like to clearly expand our market position in the booming region Asia," Kotzbauer said, adding that the Asian market in corporate customer business is the most significant one after Western Europe, and that both China and Germany are powerhouses in their respective regions, setting a solid foundation for achieving the goal.
The bank's economists are expecting to see sustained growth in Asia in the coming years and predict that China's economy will grow by 8.2 percent in 2011.
Unlike Deutsche Bank's focus on the investment banking business and other banks' efforts to tap into the local market, Commerzbank made it clear that it would follow German companies into China, and work with Chinese companies, especially SMEs, that want to extend their business into Europe through the springboard of Germany.
The number of German companies that have business contact with Chinese SMEs grew by as much as 20 percent last year, and a further increase can be achieved through acquisition of new customers and intensification of existing business relationships, the bank said.
Commerzbank has 100,000 SME clients. It lent 900 million euros ($1.24 billion) to about 800 Chinese companies last year and 3.3 billion euros to the whole Asia region during that period.
"We want to be the first port of call for foreign companies regarding their activities involving Germany We don't want to appeal purely to local clients," Kotzbauer said.
Since Commerzbank started to focus fully on cross-border business one year ago, the number of its Chinese corporate clients increased by 20 to 30 percent, he said.
"We are comfortable with the existing strategy." Kotzbauer said the bank has no interest in buying stakes of Chinese financial institutions in the short and medium term, the route its counterparts usually took to explore the Chinese market.
To complete its product portfolio in China, the bank's Beijing branch will begin renminbi business in April, and an electronic payment system will be available in May to better serve the Chinese clients.
Commerzbank opened its first representative office in Beijing in 1981. It now has three branches - in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin - and a correspondent banking relationship with around 80 Chinese banks.
The bank currently has 1,500 German branches but will reduce that number to 1,200 while extending its business to 60 sites in more than 50 countries. It serves about 14 million private clients as well as 1 million business and corporate clients and has about 59,000 employees.
In 2010, it posted gross revenue of 12.7 billion euros, its best financial result ever, against a loss of 4.54 billion euros in 2009.
