By Ayenat Mersie
NAIROBI (Reuters) -Kenyan bank KCB Group laid out plans for further regional expansion on Wednesday after the country’s second-biggest lender by assets reported a 29% jump in first-half pre-tax profit.
KCB reported pre-tax profit of 28.2 billion shillings ($235 million) for the first six months of this year. Net interest income rose 12% to 40.59 billion shillings, while provisions for bad loans fell by about a third year-on-year, according to group chief financial officer Lawrence Kiambi.
The bank, which also operates in Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda and Burundi, said subsidiaries outside of Kenya also helped raise its earnings and it was aiming to expand further. Kiambi told investors that contribution to pre-tax profit increased 17% compared with last year.
KCB said it expected its acquisition of a 85% stake in Trust Merchant Bank, a lender based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, announced earlier this month, to close by the fourth quarter of this year.
The bank said it was also was closely tracking potential opportunities in Ethiopia, which is expected KCB was closely watching regulations in Ethiopia which are set to XX to soon open up its banking sector.
“It is a market that we shall look at very, very closely. We think that it’s the last frontier we want to be in before we start consolidating our business,” said group chairman Andrew Wambari Kairu.
($1 = 119.7500 Kenyan shillings)
(Reporting by Ayenat Mersie; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by James Macharia Chege and Tomasz Janowski)
