ABN Amro Bank | Royal Bank of Scotland Group | ABN Amro Inloggen
Image via CrunchBase
The UK-based financial services giant, Royal Bank of Scotland group (RBS), reduced the size of its India asset book by more than a third in 2009.
The beleaguered bank, which is 84 per cent owned by the UK government, has reduced its risk assets in India from 5.56 billion pounds (Rs 39,328 crore) at the end of 2008 to 3.60 billion pounds (Rs 25,458 crore) in 2009.
The sharpest fall was seen in personal assets, which fell from 1.02 billion pounds to 547 million pounds as of December 31, 2009.
Corporate risk assets also fell from 2.58 billion pounds to 3.8 billion pounds at the end of 2009.
As part of its recast, the bank has divided its global businesses into a core group, which the bank plans to retain and the for-sale non-core division. In India, the global banking and markets (GBM) and global transaction services (GBS) divisions are part of the core group while consumer banking and commercial banking businesses are part of the non-core group.
RBS’ core assets in India totaled 2.89 billion pounds while non-core assets were 719 million pounds at the end of 2009. While profit figures for India operations were not revealed, the group reported a net loss of 3.6 billion pounds for 2009, a significant improvement over the 24 billion pounds loss reported in 2008.
The lender has been scouting for buyers for its retail and SME divisions in India, China and Malayasia. Till October last year, Standard Chartered Bank was the front-runner for the businesses but the talks fell through due to disagreements on valuations and lack of clarity on the fate of the branch licences. HSBC is now reported to be one of the contenders for the sale.
The bank recently completed the re-branding of its India operations to RBS from its earlier avatar as ABN Amro Bank. ABN Amro Bank’s profits for the fiscal year ended March 31 in India had dropped 93.09 per cent to Rs 19.39 crore.
The bank had written off debt worth Rs 962 crore in financial year 2009, an almost three-fold increase from previous year’s Rs360 crore. The lender’s consumer banking operations posted an operating loss of Rs230.77 crore at the end of March 2009.
Source : Business Standard.
