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Agriculture Promotion Bank to relocate headquarters
The Agriculture Promotion Bank (APB) will relocate its headquarters from Vientiane city centre to the suburbs, to ease traffic congestion.
The bank is building an eight-storey facility in Phakhao village, Xaythany district, at a cost of 76 billion kip. The existing building will be used as the bank's Vientiane branch, APB Office Head Mr Yuay Pa-thoummady said.
C onstruction of the new headquarters began last year and is expected to be complete in 2013. The project site is 40m x 100m but the building itself covers an area of 29m x 42m.
Mr Yuay said the existing building is not sufficiently large to house both the Vientiane branch and the headquarters because of limited parking space.
The new building also reflects the bank's positive growth, he added.
The Agriculture Promotion Bank was established in 1993 as a state-owned policy bank, and has since been considered the country's development bank, focusing on the agriculture sector.
According to the bank's website, the APB is the main public rural finance instrument in Laos, with 50 percent of total lending directed towards policy lending.
Since its creation, APB has effectively never been supervised or regulated by the central bank.
In 2002, a diagnostic study that conducted the first external audit of APB found that 88 percent of its assets were non-performing. This situation resulted from a lack of profit orientation, poor lending mechanisms, and weak provisioning.
In 2003 APB entered a formal phase of restructuring, which included phasing out of policy and subsidised lending, adoption of market-based principles, improvement of lending policies, recapitalisation and strengthening of information systems and management capabilities.
Currently, APB has 17 branches and 65 service units throughout the country. The bank employs nearly 2,000 people, including 200-300 people in Vientiane.
vientiane times
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