Aided by “healthy” expansion in core earnings, Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) has reported about 11% growth year-on-year in net profit to QR1.78bn in the first nine months of this year.
Total assets grew 11% to QR149bn, driven by growth in the investing and financing activities, a QIB spokesman said in a communiqué.
Financing stood at QR99bn, which represented 3% growth compared with the period of January-September 2016. Investment in securities soared 62% year-on-year to QR31bn due to parking of funds in high quality liquid assets.
Customer deposits registered a 2% gain to QR99bn at the end of September 30, 2017.
Total income of the lender witnessed more than 16% growth to QR4.72bn with income from financing and investments rising 19% to QR4.18bn, reflecting a healthy growth in its core operating activities.
QIB’s total expenses were up mere 0.4% to QR831mn during the first nine months of this year.
“Strict cost controls supporting higher operating revenues enabled further enhancement of efficiency, bringing down the cost-to-income ratio to 25.7% for the first nine months of 2017 compared to 30% for the same period in 2016,” the spokesman said.
QIB was able to maintain the ratio of non-performing financing assets to total financing assets at around 1%, one of the lowest in the industry, reflecting the quality of the bank’s financing assets portfolio and its effective risk management framework.
QIB continues to pursue the conservative impairment provisioning policy with the coverage ratio for non-performing financing assets moving up from 87% at the end of December 2016 to reaching 110% as on September 30, 2017.
Total shareholders’ equity of the bank stood at QR14.9bn. Capital adequacy ratio of the bank was at 16.6% at the end of the nine-month period ended September 2017, higher than the minimum regulatory requirements prescribed by the Qatar Central Bank and the Basel Committee.
In May this year, Moody’s, a global credit rating agency, has for the first time assigned long term deposit ratings to QIB at “A1”. In August, Fitch assigned QIB a long term issuer default rating of ‘A’, in April 2017 Capital intelligence reaffirmed  QIB’s financial strength rating at ‘A’ and QIB rating was affirmed by S&P at “A-”.