What can China's SOB's learn from its competitors?

Abstract: With the liberalization of its financial system and accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO), China’s commercial banks face unprecedented challenges and opportunities. As the representative of joint-venture banks, China CITIC bank has been listed on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges and has achieved substantial success during the last 20 years. At the end of 2006, according to the calculations of the British magazine “The Banker”, this bank was ranked the 134th largest bank in the word in terms of total assets (Jiao, 2007,p135). Using a case study of China CITIC bank’s successful experience, this paper will examine the current problems and challenges of state-owned banks (SOB’s) and joint-venture banks to find out(1)how much can SOB’s learn from CITIC’s experience;(2) what is the limitations for SOB’s in imitating CITIC’s case model; (3)what needs be done to improve SOB’s inherent problems? To answer the questions above, this paper will select some of CITIC bank’s successful strategies that can be adopted by SOB’s and match it with SOB’s inherent characters to answer the limitation of this case study and to give recommendations for SOB’s further development.