CAL Bank has recorded an 85 percent increase in profit after-tax in 2013, rising from GH¢49.5million in 2012 to GH¢92million.
The Board Chairman of the bank, Paarock Van Percy, said the robust balance sheet built over the past few years was critical in achieving the sterling performance.
The Chairman was addressing shareholders at the annual general meeting of the bank in Accra.
He said the bank continued to steadily build a healthy balance sheet during the review period, with total assets increasing to GH¢1.55billion and GH¢1.56billion for the bank and the Group respectively. This represents a growth 34.4 percent for the bank and 34.5 percent for the Group.
The year under review saw the bank’s gross loans increase by 30.6 percent to GH¢1billion from GH¢781.2million in the previous year.
CAL Brokers and CAL Asset Management Limited contributed GH¢1.6million to the Group’s profitability, representing 1.7 percent of its after-tax profit.
Funds managed by CAL Asset Management amounted to GH¢142.9million in 2013, compared to GH¢122.9million at the end of the previous year.
“These strong fundamentals reflected on the bank’s stock as one of the most active stocks traded on the Ghana Stock Exchange. Investor confidence in the CAL Bank stock is at an all-time high, and this resulted in the bank’s share price closing the year at GH¢0.97 -- a significant increase of 155.3 percent from GH¢0.38 achieved the previous year.â€
The Managing Director of the Bank, Frank Adu Jnr., said the bank in 2013 added the Achimota branch to serve customers in that catchment area and attract new customers as well. He said 33 additional ATMs were added to the bank’s installed ATMs at carefully selected sites to offer convenience to its customers and those of other banks who patronise the visa service on its ATMs.
This brings the bank’s ATM number to 83, and according to the Managing Director the bank intends to have 100 ATMs operational by the end of 2014.
He said the company is currently in the project phase of introducing MasterCard and China Union Pay platforms to its card services, and will also introduce a new Internet banking platform.
He said during the year under review, significant investments were made in technology to ensure the bank maintains a robust system and platform to guarantee a high-system uptime and quality service delivery.
He added that in order to ensure the bank is adequately funded and has sufficient liquidity to meet its obligations on a timely basis, the Group maintains and continues to develop funding sources and liquidity anchored on a solid customer base.
In this regard, he said the bank was able to secure US$20million and US$40million lines of credit from OFID and Citibank respectively during the year under review, saying the bank has drawn down US$10million of the funding and is yet to draw down the balance.
“The current global economy and the Ghanaian economy in particular will continue to have challenges which will place significant pressure on our earnings and growth potential, but also present significant opportunity to our bank.
“Individuals, businesses, government and regulators will increasingly need to work together to manage these pressures, and CAL Bank is ideally placed to take advantage of the opportunities that will be presented,†he said.
By Benson Afful | B&FT Online | Ghana
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS