WORKSHOP TRAVEL: A foreign tourist holds a baozi—a meat or vegetable-stuffed bun—that he made at a workshop hosted by a local food company in the Yangzhou Food Industrial Park, east China's Jiangsu Province, on April 24 (ZHUANG WENBIN)

More Trips Abroad

More people from smaller Chinese cities are traveling abroad, a new research report released on April 24 showed.

Thanks to the country's rapid economic development, residents of second- and third-tier cities have plans to go overseas for their holidays, according to the China Outbound Tourism Development 2013 Report, released by the China Tourism Academy.

"Outbound tourism is no longer a privilege of the rich," said Jiang Yiyi, a researcher with the academy. "Lower-tier cities have and will continue to contribute substantially to its development."

For instance, from January to September last year, the number of Chinese tourists from second-tier cities who visited Singapore rose 28 percent year on year, while the number from first-tier cities increased 18 percent.

The number of outbound visits exceeded 83.18 million, a year-onyear increase of 18.41 percent. Total overseas spending by Chinese tourists in 2012 reached $102 billion, the report said.

The number of outbound visits from China is expected to reach 94.3 million this year, a year-on-year increase of 15 percent, while spending is to hit a record $117.6 billion, according to Dai Bin, head of the academy.

"More tourism agencies are shifting their focus to outbound tourism, which will provide more capital, human resources and channels for the field," he said.

Profit Declines

The performance of foreign banks in China dropped last year compared with the previous year, as the country witnessed the slowest growth in three years and the authorities further liberalized interest rates.

According to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), foreign banks achieved profits after taxes of 16.3 billion yuan ($2.61 billion) in 2012, down from 16.7 billion yuan ($2.7 billion) in 2011.

Their asset quality also fell as the ratio of soured loans against total loans rose to 0.52 percent at the end of last year, from the 0.41 percent one year earlier, said the report.

"Chinese banks, especially the five state-owned lenders, have dominated the market, and their growth has affected the market share of foreign banks," said Jimmy Leung, China banking and capital markets leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers China.

He said the economic environment had more influence on foreign players as their financing business is more important to them than to their Chinese counterparts, and that the CBRC's tighter regulations on fees last year have also hurt their income more severely than Chinese banks, which are still highly dependent on the traditional lending business.

SOEs' Duties

China's state-owned enterprise (SOEs) watchdog is urging SOEs to take responsibility for "maintaining growth" by keeping profit growth rates over 10 percent.

Jiang Jiemin, head of the Stateowned Assets Supervision and Administration of the State Council, said that the SOEs performed in a stable manner during the first quarter, in line with expectations.

China's SOEs saw their combined profits expand 7.7 percent year on year to 513.73 billion yuan ($82.2 billion) in the first quarter of the year, the Ministry of Finance said.

Good profit growth was posted by SOEs operating in electronics, electric power, construction, pharmaceutical and the petrochemical sectors. But some SOEs in the nonferrous metal, construction materials, coal and chemical sectors saw profit –declines.