Daiwa Bank on Thursday reported pretax losses of 151.2 billion yen for fiscal 1997 -- compared to pretax profits of 4.2 billion yen a year before -- due to its continued efforts to erase nonperforming loans from its balance sheets.
Net business profit at the Osaka-based bank came to 96.5 billion yen, down 1.9 percent from a year earlier. Despite the dismal figures, the bank said it will still pay out dividends.
The bank put writeoffs of nonperforming loans for the year at 389.9 billion yen, up 192.6 percent from fiscal 1996 levels. As to the amount of potentially sour loans the bank still holds, Daiwa said that under expanded disclosure standards it had 958.2 billion yen worth of assets which need to be managed with due care.
Meanwhile, Sumitomo Bank on Thursday released fiscal 1997 earnings reports which showed it incurred a pretax loss of 617.4 billion yen as it worked to write off bad assets.
It had pretax profits of 51.5 billion yen in fiscal 1996, but net business profit for the year that ended in March came to 308.1 billion yen, down 8.9 percent from the year before.
Officials said the bank shed a total 1.04 trillion yen in nonperforming loans from its balance sheets during the year, up sharply from the 326.4 billion yen it wrote off in fiscal 1996.
Sumitomo also placed 54.3 billion yen into its loan loss reserves to cover for loans extended to the Asian region. Roughly 20 percent of loans to Indonesia were included in the reserves, officials said.