Horizon.my

Cost-Income Ratio is a useful performance indicator we can use to guage the efficiency of a bank’s operations. In Malaysia currently, the Cost-Income Ratio for our banking sector varies from between 30% – 50%. The most efficient bank in terms of Cost-Income is still Public Bank which last year brought its CI down to just [...]

I was reading an article about Public Bank in TheStar on Tuesday. It was titled “OSK: Selldown in Public Bank overdone”. As I write this post PBBANK is trading at RM7.55, up around 50-60 sen from its recent low. Is the sell down really overdone? PBBANK has always traded at a premium to its peers. [...]

How to Tell Bad News and Make your Share Price Go Up… maybe this is a better title for this article. I am talking about the 13-Feb Profit Announcement by AMMB Holdings Berhad, Malaysia’s fifth largest banking group by total assets. In that Announcement, it was obvious that the bank is increasingly negative about the Malaysia [...]

As an investor, you want to make sure that your company is not paying obscene salaries to the top execs. We’ve seen what happened at the US investment banks such as Lehmans and Merrill Lynch. Since I’ve got some bank shares, I was a little curious about what our top banking executives earn here in [...]

Here are the key highlights for Malaysia’s banking sector in December 08 based on figures published by Bank Negara. 1. Loan growth of 12.8% year-on-year, driven by business and mortgage loans. This is as the strongest showing since 1998. 2. Industry NPL ratio stood at 4.1% (down from 5.6% last year). NPL is now at [...]

Last week since 13/11/08 we saw a kick off in the quarterly reporting season for Malaysia’s banking majors: AMMB Holdings (AMMB) Hong Leong Bank (HLBANK) Malayan Banking (MAYBANK) Bumiputra-Commerce (COMMERZ) Overall AMMB and HLBANK threw in pretty good results, while MAYBANK and COMMERZ not so good. After digesting some of the Press Releases and Analyst [...]

Last week the Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) said that the country was not experiencing any credit crunch. The banking sector remains strong and well-capitalized in the face of global financial turmoil -commercial banks are not putting any brakes in lending and it is “business as usual”. As at the end-August 2008, the industry’s loan [...]

There is an article in The Star, Saturday 27/9/08 which quoted Cheah Tek Kuang as saying that Malaysian companies are looking to borrow from banks because the domestic bond market has dried up. Most Malaysian companies are healthy and it does not make sense for them to issue bonds at current prices. Basically AMMB’s performance targets [...]

as per AMMB 2008 Annual Report