Egypt Bad-Loan Levels Signal Lenders Defy Economic Slowdown: Arab Credit - Bloomberg

Egypt’s banks are withstanding the nation’s worst political crisis in three decades after the central bank eased rules on provisions and kept interest rates at a five-year low.

The National Bank of Egypt, the country’s biggest lender by assets, didn’t book any non-performing loans in the first half of this year, Chairman Tarek Amer said. The ratio of non- performing loans to gross loans at the country’s three biggest publicly traded lenders --Commercial International Bank Egypt SAE (COMI), National Societe Generale Bank and Credit Agricole Egypt SAE (CIEB) -- declined or remained unchanged in the second quarter, beating analyst forecasts, according to AlembicHC Securities and Naeem Holding.

“The increase in non-performing loans is less than we expected and the quality of the loan book is deteriorating less quickly than we anticipated,” Jaap Meijer, head of the bank team at Dubai-based AlembicHC, said in a telephone interview Aug. 21. “It’s pretty resilient. Probably the impact on the corporate clients is less than expected.”

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