SC Bank Korea’s Jan.-Sept. net profit down 14.5% due to ELS losses

SC Bank CI

Standard Chartered Bank Korea Ltd. announced on Thursday that its net profit in the first three quarters of this year fell 14.5 percent from a year ago to 267.7 billion won ($190.71 million).

The bank said the decline was due to a one-time operating expense of 102.7 billion won recognized to compensate for losses on equity-linked securities (ELS) products tied to the Hong Kong H-Share index.

For the third quarter alone, Standard Chartered raised 63.7 billion won in net profit, down 38.75 percent from the same period a year ago.

Interest income fell by 5.1 percent in the first three quarters from a year ago as the asset scale declined despite an improvement in net interest margin (NIM).

Non-interest income also dropped by 13.8 percent during the same period due to factors such as decreased foreign exchange derivatives profit, despite an increase in sales fees in the retail banking group‘s wealth management (WM) division.

However, the bank managed to reduce operating expenses to about 630 billion won in the January-September period, down 11.6 percent from last year.