Annual reports are all making "blunders," does Everbright Bank still refuse to let go of its arrogance?

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(Source: Yuan Media Exchange)

Author | Tong Hua

“Set the overall risk appetite of the bank based on facts and reality, solidly carry out the effectiveness assessment of risk management… Strengthen internal control compliance and audit supervision” — in the speech at the 2025 annual report, Chairman Wu Lijun emphasized risk prevention.

With assets surpassing 7 trillion yuan, Everbright Bank should have showcased its industry position with a splendid annual report, but unexpectedly, it delivered a “yearly farce” to the capital market.

For the same 2025 annual report, Everbright Bank presented two vastly different versions on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges: Shanghai branch assets shrank from 443.1 billion yuan to 39.5 billion yuan, and data for 40 branches “misidentified,” with an error rate as high as 85%.

Even more ironic, Everbright Bank, which caused the “blunder annual report,” didn’t issue a single apology to investors, only releasing a notice in the Hong Kong market stating, “The correction does not affect any other information published in the annual performance announcement.”

This is not Everbright Bank’s first data “blunder.” The well-known nationwide joint-stock bank also once caused Guangdong citizen Mr. Qin to carry a debt of “100 trillion yuan,” with no apology issued.

Behind the “arrogance” lies the reality of Everbright Bank’s revenue “four consecutive declines,” rising non-performing loan ratio, and NPLs breaking the 50 billion yuan mark.

“Blunder Annual Report” Record Error Rate

The importance of annual reports for listed companies to investors is self-evident, but Everbright Bank surprisingly disclosed two different data versions, which is truly baffling.

On the evening of March 30, Everbright Bank simultaneously disclosed its 2025 annual report on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. However, when investors opened the report, they initially suspected their eyes were playing tricks — the same branch asset sizes differed between the A-share and H-share versions.

The most absurd was the Shanghai branch, where the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s corrected version showed assets of 70k yuan, while the original Hong Kong version shrank directly to 39.54 billion yuan. The “disappearance” of over 400 billion yuan in assets is more thrilling than a suspense drama.

Image source: Everbright Bank H-share announcement

Not only the Shanghai branch, but the data for Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, and Qingdao branches in the Bohai Rim region also appeared chaotic. For example, Tianjin branch’s assets in the A-share report were 10M yuan, but in the H-share report, it was 443.19B yuan; Shijiazhuang branch’s assets in A-shares were 101.33B yuan, but 59.84B yuan in H-shares; Qingdao branch’s assets differed by more than four times between the two versions, at 98.01 billion yuan and 120.27B yuan respectively, making it seem like reports from two different banks.

Branches in the Pearl River Delta region also weren’t spared. Guangzhou branch’s assets in the A-share report were 286.7B yuan, 2.5 times the H-share figure; Shenzhen branch’s assets were even more exaggerated, at 338.49B yuan in A-shares, 5.5 times the H-share figure, effectively “cutting” 80% of Shenzhen branch’s assets.

After verification by multiple media outlets, among the 47 branches listed by Everbright Bank, 40 showed data discrepancies, with an error rate of 85%, setting a “record” for recent listed company disclosures.

The report caused market shock. Everbright Bank’s operation appeared even more surreal: first, the Shanghai Stock Exchange quietly replaced the erroneous version, while the Hong Kong Stock Exchange delayed updating until April 1 — April Fools’ Day — when a correction notice was finally issued, casually explaining it was a “layout issue, with some misaligned rows.”

Even more absurd, this flawed annual report received a “clean opinion” from the Big Four international accounting firm KPMG. The auditors failed to catch such obvious mass errors, and Everbright Bank announced plans to re-engage KPMG as its external auditor for 2026. This “closed-loop” operation left investors bewildered.

How does Everbright Bank explain the contradiction between internal control self-assessment and actual situation regarding the “blunder annual report”? What specific rectification measures will be taken to prevent similar incidents? When will the full investigation report be released to the market? With these questions, Yuan Media Exchange recently wrote to Everbright Bank, but as of press time, no reply has been received.

In fact, this is not Everbright Bank’s first “blunder.” Just three months ago, in January, Guangdong citizen Mr. Qin revealed to the media that a Light Everbright Bank quasi-credit card he held showed a debt of 1,000 trillion yuan. Even more bizarre, this debt only appeared in the Cloud QuickPay credit card repayment record, but could not be found in Everbright Bank’s transaction history.

Despite repeated media inquiries about the “1,000 trillion yuan debt,” Everbright Bank has not provided a clear response.

Performance Continues to Decline, Senior Executives’ Salaries Rise

If the “blunder annual report” is a matter of “face,” then the decline in performance is a “core” failure.

Everbright Bank’s 2025 results can be summarized as “the Year of Xiao Er’s New Year, getting worse each year”: operating income was 286.7B yuan, down 6.72% year-on-year, marking four consecutive years of decline since 2022; net profit attributable to parent was 10M yuan, down 6.88%, making it one of the few listed banks with “double decline” in performance.

Image source: Wind

Behind the “four consecutive declines” in operating income is Everbright Bank’s operational dilemma.

As the core source of bank income, Everbright Bank’s net interest income in 2025 was 10M yuan, down 4.72% from 2024 by 126.31B yuan; net interest margin and net interest yield both declined, meaning “the profit margin from interest spread is narrowing.”

Under the background of LPR rate cuts and fee reductions, the banking industry generally faces pressure of narrowing interest margins, but Everbright Bank’s performance is notably poor.

Non-interest income worsened further, totaling 34.21 billion yuan for the year, down 11.71% year-on-year. The only bright spot was “fee and commission income” at 38.83B yuan, up 6.19% from 2024; however, “other income” was only 92.1B yuan, down 4.57B from 2024, a decrease of 29.07%.

Image source: Everbright Bank 2025 Annual Report

Credit card business continued to shrink, with income dropping to 20.25B yuan in 2025, over 18% lower than 1.18B yuan in 2024, and transaction volume fell from 1.68 trillion yuan to 1.48 trillion yuan.

Even more startling, Everbright Bank’s net profit attributable to the parent experienced a “plunge” in the fourth quarter of 2025.

In the first three quarters of 2025, the bank’s quarterly net profit hovered above 12 billion yuan, but in the fourth quarter, it plummeted to 13.96B yuan, a 64.87% drop from 5.72B yuan in the same period of 2024.

Image source: Everbright Bank 2025 Annual Report

What exactly happened in Everbright Bank’s fourth quarter of 2025?

The answer lies in “credit impairment losses.” In the first three quarters, the bank provisioned a total of 26.9B yuan for impairments, but in the single fourth quarter, it provisioned 33.16B yuan — as if suddenly “settling the accounts” at year-end, writing off a large amount of bad debts all at once.

This “end-of-period blitz” approach raises questions about whether it’s an attempt to “smooth performance,” concentrating problems into one quarter.

What’s more, investors are dissatisfied that while performance declined, senior management’s compensation increased against the trend. In 2024, senior executives’ pay was 7.5752 million yuan, rising to 9.7903 million yuan in 2025; Secretary Zhang Xuyang’s salary increased from 1.4445 million to 1.5920 million yuan, leading among executives.

While profits are shrinking, executive pay is rising — it seems listed company executives can only “share prosperity” but not “share hardship.” How does Everbright Bank justify this?

Bad loans surpass 50 billion yuan

Behind the performance pressure is Everbright Bank’s increasingly severe asset quality issues.

By the end of 2025, non-performing loans exceeded 50 billion yuan for the first time, reaching 16.8k yuan, an increase of 1.49 billion yuan from the end of 2024; the NPL ratio rose to 1.27%, breaking the four-year stable pattern of 1.25%, showing a “double increase.”

As the “risk buffer” of the bank, the provision coverage ratio declined by 6.45 percentage points to 174.14%; loan loss reserve coverage ratio was 2.22%, down 0.04 percentage points year-on-year. These indicate that Everbright Bank’s future risk resistance may continue to weaken.

Image source: Everbright Bank 2025 Annual Report

Among the 14.8k yuan in NPLs, corporate NPLs reached 1.81B yuan, up 8.2 billion from 2024, mainly dragged down by the real estate and manufacturing sectors.

Everbright Bank’s 2025 annual report shows that the real estate sector’s NPL balance was 7.7 billion yuan, nearly 1 billion more than in 2024, remaining the largest sector; manufacturing NPLs were 5.15B yuan, also nearly 1 billion higher than in 2024, making these two industries the “hardest hit” areas for bad loans.

Retail loans also did not “escape unscathed,” with NPLs growing faster, reaching 21.44 billion yuan at the end of 2025, an increase of 670 million yuan from the end of 2024.

A more dangerous signal is that risk is intensifying. In 2025, the migration rate of suspicious loans was 69.06%, up 27.53 percentage points year-on-year. This indicates that a large number of loans showing early signs of risk are accelerating into bad loans, requiring more provisioning and further eroding profits.

Image source: Everbright Bank 2025 Annual Report

To resolve bad loans, Everbright Bank employed all means in 2025, disposing of 18.84B yuan in non-performing loans, an increase of 17.59B yuan from the previous year. Disposal methods included write-offs of 50.74B yuan, asset securitization of 50.74B yuan, debt-to-equity swaps of 442 million yuan, etc., recovering 29.3B yuan in cash.

Despite significant disposal efforts, the balance of NPLs and the NPL ratio still increased in 2025, indicating that new bad loans outpaced disposals, and risk control remains a major challenge.

Internal control and compliance risks also continue to ferment. This was not only exposed in the “blunder annual report” but also reflected in administrative penalties. In 2025, Everbright Bank’s head office and branches received 46 fines totaling over 36 million yuan; in the first three months of 2026, the bank received 7 more fines exceeding 4 million yuan, including the Shenzhen branch’s “rolling issuance of bank acceptance bills,” revealing weak compliance management.

From the “blunder annual report” to declining performance and stressed asset quality, Everbright Bank’s 2025 performance shows this giant with assets over 7 trillion yuan is somewhat overwhelmed.

While annual report errors can be corrected via announcements, once investor trust is lost, it’s hard to rebuild. Everbright Bank needs a thorough investigation, accountability, and effective rectification to restore market confidence.

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