NAIROBI (Reuters) – Kenya’s KCB Group, the country’s biggest bank by assets, posted an 86% increase in its pretax profit for 2021 to 47.8 billion shillings ($418 million), it said on Wednesday, as economies start to recover from the COVID pandemic slump.
KCB, which also operates in Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan, joins other big lenders in the East African country in posting high double-digit growth in profits for last year, driven by the economic bounce.
Its total revenue rose by 13.5% during the period, thanks to a 15% increase in net interest income and a robust performance in its foreign exchange trading business, it said in a statement.
The share of non-performing loans, however, deteriorated to 16.5% of the total book from 14.7% a year earlier, KCB said, reflecting the lingering damage of the pandemic to some sectors.
“Construction, hospitality and manufacturing continued to come under pressure with slow recovery,” the lender said, adding that provisions for loan impairments had however halved during the period to 13 billion shillings.
KCB recommended a final dividend of 2.00 shillings per share, bringing the total for the year to 3.00 shillings per share, triple the amount offered to investors in the prior year.
(Reporting by Duncan Miriri, Editing by Louise Heavens and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
