President Kim Do-jin of Industrial Bank of Korea. (Photo: IBK)

The Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) said recently that its third-quarter net profit gained 15.9 percent from a year earlier, largely due to a decline in loan-loss provisions.

Net income stood at 523 billion won ($459.3 million) on a consolidated basis in the July-September period, compared with 451 billion won the previous year, the policy lender said in a regulatory filing.
Operating profit rose 19.4 percent on-year to 701.9 billion won for the third quarter.

IBK specializes in supporting small and medium enterprises.
The bank’s net interest margin, a key measure of profitability, reached 1.95 percent in the third quarter, inching down 0.01 percentage point from a quarter earlier.

The lender, which specializes in supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs), saw its outstanding loans to smaller firms reach 151.1 trillion won as of end-September, up 6.1 percent from the end of last year. Its SME loans dominated the market with a leading 22.6 percent share.

Industrial Bank of Korea engages in the provision of banking services. It operates through the following business divisions: Corporate Banking and Retail Banking division. The Corporate Banking division provides financial services to small-and-medium-enterprise (SME) companies, loans, consulting services, job creation, import and export financing services.

The Retail Banking division offers private banking and retail loans. In addition, it also offers products and services such as deposit, credit card, smart banking, telephone banking, internet banking, foreign exchange, exchange rate and foreign investment.

The company was founded on August 1, 1961 and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. A state-owned Korean bank has offered about 182 million pounds to buy the City of London landmark One Poultry close to the Bank of England, people briefed on the situation said.

IBK Securities, an investment subsidiary of Industrial Bank of Korea, is funding a bid for the distinctive pink and yellow postmodernist building leased to the serviced office provider WeWork, said two people familiar with the deal.

IBK Securities is working with asset manager Hana Financial Group, in line with Korean rules requiring real-estate fund assets to be held by an asset management company, the people said. Some 80 per cent of the space in One Poultry was leased late last year to WeWork, the fast-growing serviced U.S. office provider. The building, completed in 1997 and designed by the renowned architect James Stirling, is undergoing refurbishment.

IBK is the latest large investor to place its faith in WeWork as a tenant after the US serviced office company leased 2.6m sq ft of office space in the UK capital.

The string of deals for WeWork-leased buildings come despite concerns over the transparency of the company’s finances that caused the rating agency Moody’s to cease rating its bonds last month.

A Holborn building let to WeWork was sold to a fund run by the German bank Deka last month for 85 million pounds, while earlier this year a private Middle Eastern investor bought one in the Marylebone area for 60 million pounds.

Buildings leased mainly to we work or its rivals often sell at lower prices than others in similar areas, however, because privately owned companies provide less financial information than listed ones and because serviced office groups have previously collapsed during economic downturns.