Impact of Foreign Banks´ Profitability on Domestic Banks´ Earnings in BRIC

Abstract: The current study aimed at investigating the impact of foreign banks on domestic banks in (Brazil, Russia, India and China) BRIC group of countries during 2001-2011. The importance of this topic is due to instability of financial industry and continuously changing financial markets. Financial liberalization did not only give boom to banking industry but also made it more competitive and unstable. To stay in competition, banks follow risky practices that do not only create problems within financial industry but also become cause of financial crisis. Financial crisis in 2008 is one of the examples of risky practices. Due to the importance of this topic, many researchers conducted studies on it. One of the famous studies on that topic was conducted by Claessens et al in (2001). Their study examined foreign and domestic banks in developing and the developed countries. It was found that foreign banks became the cause of reduction in domestic banks’ income, profit and cost in developing countries. Current study was the extension of Claessens et al (2001) with some amendments. First of all, current study focused on BRIC countries only which are the fastest growing developing countries. Second, this study compared foreign bank’s profitability with domestic bank’s profitability. Whereas, return on assets and return on equity was used as an indicator of profitability. Nearly 1600 bank’s financial data was collected from Bankscope database and Thomason Reuter’s DataStream. The current Study followed a Quantitative research method in order to investigate two research questions; first was the impact of foreign bank’s profitability on domestic bank’s earnings during 2001-2011 and second was foreign and domestic bank’s financial performance during financial crisis. Hierarchical multiple regression in the absence of control variables (foreign bank’s market share, inflation rate, real interest rate and GDP growth rate) explained that foreign banks were positively related with domestic banks in BRIC during 2001-2011. This Study rejected previous research results that foreign banks had negative relation with domestic banks in developing countries. Second result showed that in fast growing developing countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, domestic banks performed better than foreign banks during financial crisis whereas foreign bank’s profitability had high volatility then domestic banks in financial crisis.