Kookmin Bank Q4 net grows by $291.23mln

Lender’s profit back to green despite KB Financial’s Q4 net slid by 59.4%.

Kookmin Bank, the group's flagship unit and the largest local lender, swung to a net profit of 17.8 billion won ($15.41 million) in the fourth quarter after posting a loss of 318.5 billion won ($275.82) a year earlier, KB Financial, the bank’s said.

The bank's net interest margin (NIM), which measures profitability from lending, stood at 2.61 percent as of end-December, compared with 3.03 percent a year earlier, the group said. NIM indicates the difference between interests paid out on deposits and interest gained from lending.

The capital adequacy ratio under the rules set by the Bank for International Settlement reached 14.1 percent as of the end of December while the group's non-performing loans accounted for 1.1 percent of its total lending.

For the whole of 2009, the KB Financial's net income came to 539.8 billion won ($468.65 million) compared with 1.9 trillion won ($1.65 billion) booked the previous year, it said.

View the whole article in Trading Markets.