Singapore, Feb 5 (DPA) Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings Ltd, South-East Asia’s biggest bank, Friday said its net profit in the last quarter 2009 jumped 67 percent compared to a year ago, as strong gains in fee income and loans offset a rise in bad debt charges.
In the three months through December last year, net profit including one-time items jumped to 493 million Singapore dollars ($346 million), up from 295 million Singapore dollars a year earlier, DBS said in a statement.
Bad debt charges in the fourth quarter 2009 soared 43 percent to 384 million Singapore dollars.
For the whole year 2009, allowances for credit and other losses nearly doubled to 1.53 billion Singapore dollars compared to a year earlier, according to the statement.
DBS said the increase in non-performing loans “was largely due to borrowers outside Asia,” but did not give details.
The bank earlier said that its total exposure to the debt-ridden city-state of Dubai came up to about 1.8 billion Singapore dollars.
DBS’s net earnings reached 2.06 billion Singapore dollars in 2009, unchanged from a year ago.
“2009 was a tough year by any measure,” DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta said in the statement.
