In this year’s Top 1000 World Banks profit ranking, both the Asia-Pacific region and North America registered marginal declines in their share of the global total. Nevertheless, Asia-Pacific banks once again dominated the overall figures, accounting for 50.81% of global profits.
This was a marginal reduction from the 2014 profit ranking, when the figure was 51.19% of the global total, and a further fall from the high recorded in 2013 when Asia-Pacific accounted for 56.7%. In part this fall in profitability may reflect the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which in turn has had an appreciable impact on the wider region. It should also be taken into account that there is increasing competition in China’s banking sector, and Beijing is moving towards interest rate liberalisation.