The minister of entrepreneur development and cooperatives, Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, said the payout amounted to RM373.36 million which will be credited into the accounts of 834,302 members effective today.
“Bank Rakyat has been paying a double-digit dividends for almost 22 years now except in 1998 when it paid only 8% due to the financial crisis,” he told reporters after announcing the 2020 dividend payment today.
The bank’s chairman, Abdul Rani Lebai Jaafar, said the shareholders’ fund increased by 6.2% or RM1.22 billion to RM20.95 billion compared with RM19.73 billion previously, arising from the group’s net profit carried forward during the year.
He said the bank recorded steady performance in 2020 despite a lower net profit of RM1.38 billion versus RM1.65 billion in the previous year.
He said Bank Rakyat continued to be the most profitable co-operative bank, as well as the second largest Islamic financial institution in Malaysia because of strong fundamentals and its focus on core activities amid lingering uncertainties from the pandemic and post-moratorium impact.
“The bank saw robust financing and investment activities with a slight decline in the financing income due to margin compression under the low overnight policy rate regime.
“Nevertheless, higher provisioning for potential non-performing financing, in line with the industry trend weighed on the profit,” he shared.
Abdul Rani said Bank Rakyat’s total assets also grew 1.8% or RM1.95 billion to RM111.75 billion, compared with RM109.80 billion previously while deposits including current account and savings account and term deposits stood at RM85.58 billion, as compared with RM83.83 billion previously.
The bank’s acting chief executive Syed Abdul Aziz Syed Hassan said the group will continue to focus on new growth areas particularly from the untapped potential within its businesses and operations, in order to create long-term value to members.
He said the bank was well established in retail financing especially personal financing and would further diversify its portfolio into small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and cooperative segments financing.
“We are targeting to disburse about RM7 billion financing to SMEs by 2025, and about RM400 million has been disbursed to date. Hence via SMEC we expect to better serve the needs of SMEs by providing them with better and faster service,” he said.
Syed Abdul Aziz said the bank’s loan growth for last year was almost 100% considering the size of its capital. “We hope to be able to sustain it for this year,” he added.