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Bank of China Chairman Xiao Gang at a news conference in Hong Kong announcing the bank's results for the last year. The lender said its second-half profit more than doubled.

Bank of China (BOC), the mainland's second-largest lender, said yesterday its 2006 net profit soared 65 percent, on strong operating income and reduced taxes.

"The substantial improvement in net profit was attributable to robust growth of operating income, improved operating efficiency, effective management of credit costs and a decrease in the effective tax rate," Xiao Gang, the bank's chairman, said yesterday.

The bank notched up a net profit of 42.83 billion yuan last year under international accounting standards, compared with 25.92 billion yuan a year ago. The net profit was higher than its initial public offering forecast of 33 billion yuan for the full year.

Operating income rose 18.6 percent year-on-year to 148.38 billion yuan.

Patrick Yiu, associate director of CASH Asset Management, said: "The result beats market expectations ... BOC withstood the interest rate rise since non-interest revenue has been a growth engine for the lender."

The bank's non-interest income grew 12.07 percent to 27.01 billion yuan, which, excluding losses from forex exposure, accounted for 23.3 percent of its total operating income, up from 22.2 percent in 2005.

Net interest income rose 20.16 percent to 121.37 billion yuan from a year earlier.

"One of the other reasons behind the good result is the pre-tax deduction," said She Minhua, a banking analyst at CITIC China Securities.

The bank paid an estimated 4.6 billion yuan less in taxes last year due to a pre-tax deduction of total domestic staff salary costs for 2006, approved by the tax authority.

Li Lihui, the bank's president, said he expected business growth this year would be slower than in 2006, due to this one-off measure.

But he was confident business would continue doing well in the coming years.

"We will try to reduce our forex exposure in 2007," said Zhu Min, executive vice-president of BOC.

He said the bank suffered a 9.8 billion yuan loss in its forex investments as a result of the yuan's appreciation against the US dollar. But the forex loss is somehow being cushioned by the fact that returns on US dollar-denominated assets are higher than those on yuan-denominated assets, he said.

The bank's A shares fell 1.32 percent to close at 5.24 yuan yesterday. Its H shares rose 0.52 percent to HK$3.9.

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