CITIC Bank has delivered its first annual report after surpassing the 10 trillion yuan mark in total assets.With a massive scale of 10.13 trillion yuan in 2025, this long-standing joint-stock bank has officially entered the &#34;10 trillion club.&#34;However, accompanying this peak in scale is not a declaration of aggressive expansion, but a rational compromise of business logic towards objective reality.The underlying tone of this compromise is most directly reflected in the management's discussions that have just concluded.CITIC Bank's 2026 spring earnings conference call was earlier than in previous years and more cautious.In the hours of executive exchanges and data disclosures, the slogan &#34;big and light,&#34; which once carried the hope of the bank's lightweight transformation, has quietly receded; Chairman Fang Heying set the tone from the outset with &#34;steady progress and quality improvement amid progress,&#34; reshaping the bank's business structure into &#34;corporate banking taking the lead, retail making steady contributions.&#34;A shift in slogan is never an isolated narrative.In the current era of economic transition between old and new growth drivers, this is not only a response to headwinds but also reflects a strategic pivot by this giant ship under the pressure of revenue – shifting from the pursuit of a &#34;lightweight&#34; transformation vision to relying on its core corporate banking base.This may indirectly confirm that the transformation path attempted by the banking industry in recent years, aiming to escape the capital-intensive cycle by expanding retail, is facing phased challenges. Since the logic of solely relying on &#34;light assets and high growth&#34; is shifting, the core task ahead turns to more pragmatic bottom-line defense.When the interest margin space in liability management is gradually eroded by time, when the internal cost reduction space touches the rigid bottom line, and when extraordinary items from historical debt collection can no longer be replicated as a norm, how has this joint-stock giant, sailing into deep waters, managed to stabilize its fundamentals?The more realistic survival logic is clearly revealed in the footnotes of the financial statements.<h2 style="text-align: left">Strategic Rebalancing</h2>To explore this strategic shift, we must first examine the financial aspects of why &#34;big and light&#34; did not materialize.CITIC Bank's retail transformation is a systematic project spanning over a decade: starting from its second transformation in 2014, establishing the &#34;Retail First Strategy&#34; in 2021, and then pursuing high-quality growth through &#34;big and light&#34; in recent years, this logic once provided the market with transformation options full of imagination.Looking solely at the total asset growth of 6.28% and the scale of 10 trillion yuan in 2025, the goal of &#34;big&#34; has been achieved;However, the quality of &#34;lightness&#34; needs to be dissected.The core measure of &#34;asset weight&#34; lies in the revenue structure and capital consumption.The key to the revenue structure is net fee and commission income, the proportion of which in total revenue indicates whether the bank has moved away from its heavy capital dependence on interest margins from deposits and loans.In this regard, CITIC Bank has delivered a resilient performance: the proportion of the bank's net fee and commission income in total revenue has rebounded to 20.28%, with the wealth management business showing particularly strong performance against the trend – fee income from wealth management increased by 45.17%, and agency business fee income grew by 24.77%.At a time when net fee and commission income is generally under pressure across the industry, the structural upward breakthrough in agency sales and wealth management has helped CITIC Bank stabilize its non-interest income.However, objectively viewing this over a longer period, this marginal improvement seems more like a difficult recovery growth, as the 20.28% proportion of net fee and commission income is still visibly lower than the high of 23.24% in 2021.More critically, the localized recovery in net fee and commission income has ultimately failed to fundamentally reverse the fact that underlying assets are quietly becoming heavier.Examining the ultimate litmus test for &#34;light capital&#34; – risk-weighted asset (RWA) density (risk-weighted assets/total assets) – CITIC Bank's performance is not outstanding: in 2024, the bank's RWA density was 74.15%, ranking in the middle among joint-stock banks, still 17.49 percentage points behind China Merchants Bank, which ranked first; by 2025, this indicator rose instead of falling, climbing to 75.85%.The substantial 7.68 trillion yuan in risk-weighted assets constitutes the heavy underlying tone behind the 10 trillion yuan scale, which has directly left an unavoidable mark of depletion on core profitability indicators: at the end of the reporting period, the bank's core tier-1 capital adequacy ratio fell to 9.48%, and its weighted average return on equity (ROE) also dropped to 9.39%.An internal analysis of efficiency data shows that the weariness of the heavy asset model is further transmitted.Although CITIC Bank's cost-to-income ratio slightly decreased to 31.61% in 2025, both per capita revenue and per capita profit showed a decline.This indicates that the improvement in indicators is more due to internal &#34;cost-cutting&#34; and extreme compression, rather than the intrinsic driving force generated by a &#34;lighter&#34; business model.The division of credit flow and revenue landscape provides a more direct confirmation of this.In 2025, CITIC Bank's corporate loan balance reached 3.29 trillion yuan, an increase of 13.24% from the beginning of the year, while the personal loan balance was only 2.37 trillion yuan, a slight increase of 0.2% year-on-year; in terms of profit, the bank's corporate business profit contribution ratio rose to 64.6% in 2025, while the highly anticipated retail profit contribution fell to 6.3%.The tilt in credit structure and revenue focus paints a panoramic picture of returning to tradition. Amid the cycle of overall pressure on retail credit, CITIC Bank has substantially shifted towards corporate credit.Vice President Gu Lingyun's detailed explanation of &#34;corporate lending&#34; at the earnings conference highlighted the essence of this strategic shift.In the context of the retail engine losing momentum, he stated that CITIC Bank has once again relied on its starting advantage of central enterprise resources and &#34;comprehensive financing&#34; capabilities. By deeply binding central and state-owned enterprises and major local projects, and leveraging the group's synergy chain, it is fully committed to expanding its core corporate banking base.This approach may no longer possess the high valuation imagination of a lightweight bank, but in a defensive cycle, it is indeed the most effective card to stabilize the overall asset scale and resist external uncertainties.Relying on the corporate banking ballast stone to smooth out the drastic fluctuations of the cycle is likely the rational choice made by CITIC Bank at the 10 trillion yuan mark.<h2 style="text-align: left">&#34;Squeezing&#34; Out Profits</h2>Since choosing to rely on the heavy-asset corporate banking business to stabilize the overall situation, it is inevitable to bear the cost of relatively low returns and thin interest margins of traditional corporate credit.Under the reality of overall revenue pressure and continuous concessions on the asset side, how to &#34;squeeze&#34; net profit from within has become a challenge that CITIC Bank must face directly.In 2025, CITIC Bank's operating net income slightly decreased by 0.55% to 212.475 billion yuan; however, despite the decline in revenue, its net profit attributable to the parent company broke through the 70 billion yuan mark, reaching 70.618 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.98%.This anomaly of &#34;increasing profit without increasing revenue&#34; is primarily attributed to the foresight and decisiveness in the interest margin defense battle.Chairman Fang Heying revealed at the earnings conference that the company's net interest margin remained stable at 1.63% in 2025, not only maintaining absolute stability but also exceeding the average of joint-stock banks by 21 basis points.In a cycle of declining asset yields, this hard-won interest margin advantage does not come from aggression on the asset side, but from strong control on the liability side.A detailed analysis of the changes in attribution clearly shows pressure on the asset side.The decline in yields on corporate and personal loans dragged down the interest margin by 19 and 14 basis points, respectively;However, liability management successfully built a defense line, with the decline in the cost rates of corporate and market-based liabilities throughout the year strongly supporting the interest margin by 17 and 45.7 basis points, respectively. The average cost rate of customer deposits was significantly reduced by 0.37 percentage points to 1.52%, and the cost rate of corporate fixed-term deposits plummeted from 2.54% to 2.11%.The significant reduction in deposit costs is precisely due to &#34;hitting the brakes a year early&#34; on the liability side.Fang Heying revealed that the company phased out high-cost liabilities such as structured deposits and large-denomination certificates of deposit 1-1.5 years ahead of its peers. This highly forward-looking defensive move has effectively provided CITIC Bank with a precious profit buffer.However, relying solely on interest margin defense is not enough to fully support the absolute growth of net profit.Deconstructing the internal structure of this nearly 3% increase in net profit, it is still an extreme financial operation. The fullness of book profit is inseparable from the precise cover provided by three paths.Firstly, rigid cost compression. Under strict control, CITIC Bank's business and management expenses decreased by 3.24% to 67.159 billion yuan. This frugality in daily operations has hard-pressed space out of the income statement.Secondly, the smoothing effect of provision adjustments. At the end of the reporting period, the bank's provision coverage ratio decreased by 5.82 percentage points from 209.43% at the end of the previous year to 203.61%. The moderate slowdown in provisioning and the release of reserves directly fed back into current profits.The most hidden support lies in the gains from the clearing of historical risks. The bank's Vice President Jin Xinian admitted that the cash collection of written-off assets throughout the year reached 12.9 billion yuan, a figure that has remained above 10 billion yuan for six consecutive years.By relying on forward-looking liability management to preserve the interest margin floor, supplemented by internal cost reduction and the recovery of historical debts to prop up the income statement, CITIC Bank has firmly supported its current performance base.However, this also indicates that as the provision coverage ratio returns to normal levels and the benefits of debt collection gradually peak, future profit growth will face tougher challenges.<h2 style="text-align: left">Breaking Through and Bottom Lines</h2>As the space for financial adjustments narrows, the core business pressures beneath the book profits begin to emerge. This &#34;hardest bone to crack&#34; is the retail sector, once placed with high hopes.When the extreme pressure on profit margins encounters the cyclical test of asset quality, the retail business not only temporarily struggles to carry the burden of the second growth curve but also becomes the main source of risk exposure.In 2025, CITIC Bank's non-performing loan ratio for credit cards climbed by 0.12 percentage points to 2.62%, and the non-performing loan ratio for personal consumer loans rose by 0.66 percentage points to 2.80%. Against the backdrop of weakening macroeconomic expectations, these once high-yield assets are undergoing severe cyclical pressure, significantly dragging down overall asset quality.Facing pressure in the retail sector, Chairman Fang Heying emphasized that &#34;steady retail contributions&#34; absolutely do not mean lowering its strategic position, and put forward a breakthrough logic of &#34;defense, seeking opportunities, accumulating strength, and following the trend.&#34;However, the reaffirmation of strategic resolve is unlikely to quickly bridge the gap in real data in the short term, and a substantive breakthrough in retail business will take time.Against the backdrop of continuous release of risks in retail credit, what truly stabilizes the bank's overall asset quality bottom line is a set of extremely traditional stock data: the personal housing mortgage loans, amounting to a staggering 1.02 trillion yuan.This massive underlying asset, accounting for 47.5% of the entire retail loan portfolio and 18.1% of the bank's total loans, with its low non-performing loan ratio of 0.41%, plays the role of a &#34;large denominator&#34; in diluting risks. It acts as a ballast stone, preventing the overall non-performing loan ratio of retail from spiraling out of control, but it also indirectly confirms that the bank's current asset structure still has a strong path dependency.As credit assets face pressure, CITIC Bank attempts to use intermediary business to repair the profit gap.In 2025, the bank's wealth management AUM achieved a growth of 16.34%, with its total scale reaching 5.70 trillion yuan; during the same period, the bank's financial markets division generated revenue of 29.918 billion yuan, pulling the bank's non-interest net income back into the positive growth range of 1.55%.However, objectively speaking, compared to the scale of the credit portfolio and the consumption of provisions, the profit contribution from these two segments is still limited and not yet sufficient to build a &#34;solid breakwater&#34; against the cycle.On the foundation of stabilizing business and risk control, CITIC Bank has revealed its final trump card for the defensive period.Board Secretary Zhang Qing revealed at the earnings conference that the company plans to increase its cash dividend payout ratio to 31.75%, with a total dividend of 21.2 billion yuan.This is not merely a temporary measure to cope with market fluctuations, but an inevitable shift for the banking industry after bidding farewell to the impulse for scale.As asset scale enters the ten trillion yuan level, extensive expansion with high capital consumption is unsustainable, and the highly anticipated lightweight asset transformation is also facing growing pains in reality. Against this backdrop, returning retained profits to shareholders in the form of ample cash and relying on stable dividends to secure market certainty is the most pragmatic adjustment to the company's operational logic.At this point, CITIC Bank's defensive formation has become clearly defined.Objectively speaking, CITIC Bank is comprehensively converging towards a stable defensive strategy. Shedding the halo of past lightweight assets and high growth, this ten trillion yuan financial giant is quietly changing course amidst the waves of the cycle.It is no longer fixated on painting a beautiful story of counter-cyclical breakthrough, but chooses to comprehensively align with a defensive financial strategy, emphasizing stability through defense, and gaining space to find true internal growth momentum to navigate the next cycle.

601998

159887

00998

512700

517900

515020

512800

512820

516210

Corporate banking carries the main load

- China CITIC Bank presented its first annual report after surpassing total assets of 10 trillion yuan in 2025, reaching 10.13 trillion yuan.  
- The bank shifted from a strategy of "big and light" to a more cautious approach, emphasizing stability and quality in its operations, with a focus on corporate services amidst declining retail performance.  
- Recent financial performance showed a slight revenue decline but a net profit increase, largely due to effective interest margin management and cost control, while the retail sector faced significant asset quality pressures.

CITIC Bank's 10 Trillion Glory and the Vanishing Slogan