Agricultural Bank's Yangtze Delta Unit Profit Drops 21%, Ping An Bank Q1 Revenue Up 4.65%

In recent weeks, multiple banks have convened mid-year work meetings, with pragmatism as the dominant tone. The sessions directly addressed realities such as slowing revenue, asset quality pressure, and the unsustainability of crude expansion models. Against the backdrop of decelerating industry growth, banks are no longer relying solely on scale expansion to drive performance. Instead, they are strengthening risk control, tapping internal growth potential, tailoring business plans to local industrial characteristics, and treating digital and AI applications as key levers to reshape core competitiveness.

Agricultural Bank of China's Shanghai branch held its mid-2026 party building and business operations meeting on July 29. The bank's Yangtze River Delta operating division reported total pre-tax profit of RMB 91.341 billion for 2025, down 21.17% from 2024. In 2025, the division recognized credit impairment losses of RMB 33.651 billion, up more than 100% year-on-year. The meeting resolved to strengthen risk control in the second half, strictly implement the main responsibility for various risk disposal tasks, and make every effort to stabilize the asset quality base. Postal Savings Bank of China's Hebei branch, at its mid-2026 operating management meeting, noted that its core indicators for revenue, profit, per-capita and per-outlet efficiency, and value creation had slipped in national rankings, and it planned to adjust its business strategy.

Ping An Bank held its mid-year work meeting on July 17. In 2025, the bank's total operating revenue and net profit attributable to shareholders fell 10.4% and 4.21% year-on-year, respectively. In the first quarter of 2026, these two metrics grew 4.65% and 3.03% year-on-year, respectively, with a net interest margin of 1.79%, up 1 basis point from the full-year 2025 level. The meeting affirmed the bank's continued aim of "returning to growth" in the second half.

Shanghai Pudong Development Bank held its mid-year meeting alongside a session on AI application promotion. The bank proposed building an "AI project" around a core foundation of five libraries—knowledge, database, problem, product, and case—to systematically advance AI from capability building to value creation. Bank of Beijing's mid-year meeting called for accelerating the digital and intelligent upgrade of technology development in the second half. In the first half of the year, the bank's corporate mobile banking restructuring project went live, its personal mobile banking and customer manager terminal "Palm Banker" were iterated, and a smart computing platform was launched, enabling unified management of AI assets and a single entry point for model access. The intelligent agent creation platform had built over 300 agents. Beijing Rural Commercial Bank's mid-year meeting emphasized strengthening digital-intelligent transformation. The bank uses five digital tools—self-service data analysis system, low-code development platform, robotic process automation, business-side self-service modeling platform, and large-model application platform—as core levers. In the first half, it added 773 new digital tool application scenarios.

Agricultural Bank of China's Inner Mongolia branch, at its mid-year meeting, said it would focus on reforms for key banks in the Hohhot-Baotou-Ordos region, closely track local peers, and push key banks to increase market share, improve rankings, and lift contributions. The Yunnan branch's mid-year meeting proposed focusing on four major actions: "grab lending, expand intermediate income, control provisions, and intensify collections." It also stressed urging corporate loans to catch up, revitalizing the whitelist support mechanism for housing development loans, and boosting the reserve of first-hand property projects and the conversion rate of public-private linkage. Yinzhou Bank's mid-year meeting said it would launch two special campaigns—"grasp, expand, control" and "double clearing, double increase"—in the second half, deepen its local grid market presence, and convert customer trust into long-term stickiness.