---
endpoint: analytics
pattern: Financial Services
status: done
latency_ms: 158562
conversation_id: f3b520cf-dfa3-4c34-80eb-7c4f4b4bcb8c
citations: 6
created: 2026-05-31 20:44:14Z
---

# Who are the key customers and suppliers of ICBC?

# ICBC (1398 HK / 601398 CH) — Key Customers and Suppliers

**Important framing**: ICBC is a commercial bank, not an industrial or consumer-goods company. It does not have "customers" and "suppliers" in the conventional supply-chain sense. The analogous concepts for a bank are:

- **"Customers"** → loan customers (corporate borrowers grouped by industry) and depositors (the two sides of a bank's core franchise).
- **"Suppliers"** → providers of funding/capital (depositors, the interbank market, bondholders, equity shareholders) and operating vendors. Banks generally do not disclose a list of named individual top loan customers or named vendors; what they do disclose is the industry concentration of loans and the structure of liabilities. I've used the latest available disclosures (FY2024 annual report and CLSA coverage notes) below.

---

## 1. Loan Customers — Industry Distribution of Domestic Corporate Loans (the "customer" base)

ICBC's largest customer concentrations are in infrastructure-, manufacturing-, and utility-related corporate lending. From the FY2024 Annual Report (Distribution of Corporate Loans of Domestic Branches by Industry of Loan Customers, as at 31 December 2024) [1]:

| Industry of Loan Customer | Loan (RMB mn) | % of Domestic Corporate Loans | NPL Ratio |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| **Transportation, storage and postal services** | 3,859,790 | **23.8%** | 0.37% |
| **Manufacturing** | 2,454,489 | **15.1%** | 1.87% |
| **Leasing and commercial services** | 2,417,060 | **14.9%** | 1.52% |
| **Water, environment and public utility management** | 1,839,421 | **11.4%** | 0.91% |
| **Production and supply of electricity, heating, gas and water** | 1,756,221 | **10.8%** | 0.43% |
| Real estate | 880,986 | 5.4% | 4.99% |
| Wholesale and retail | 768,713 | 4.7% | 4.87% |
| Construction | 483,623 | 3.0% | 2.98% |
| Science, education, culture and sanitation | 400,666 | 2.5% | 2.11% |
| Mining | 328,337 | 2.0% | 0.52% |
| Others | 1,015,627 | 6.4% | 1.64% |
| **Total domestic corporate loans** | **16,204,933** | 100.0% | – |

Source: ICBC FY2024 Annual Report [1].

**Key reads**:
- The **top 5 customer industries account for ~76%** of domestic corporate loans. Transportation/storage/postal (largely roads, rail, ports, logistics SOEs) is the single largest exposure at 23.8%, reflecting ICBC's policy-aligned infrastructure financing role.
- **Manufacturing (15.1%)** remains the second-largest customer base — broad-based across chemicals, machinery, metals, autos, electronics historically.
- **Leasing and commercial services (14.9%)** and the two **utilities/water/environment buckets (~22% combined)** illustrate ICBC's heavy SOE/LGFV-linked book.
- **Real estate (5.4%, NPL 4.99%) and Wholesale & retail (4.7%, NPL 4.87%)** are the problem pockets — they account for only ~10% of corporate loans but generate the bulk of corporate NPLs.

Historical context — in FY2020 the same disclosure showed Transportation 2,659bn, Manufacturing 1,718bn, Leasing & commercial services 1,517bn, Water/utility 1,177bn, Power 1,085bn, Real estate 958bn [2] — i.e. the top-industry mix has been very stable over five years, with Transportation, Manufacturing, and Leasing always the top three.

## 2. Retail Customers and Deposit Base

In addition to corporate borrowers, ICBC has the world's largest retail banking franchise:

- **Loans (Group, FY2023)**: RMB **26.09 tn**, +12.4% YoY; of which **Corporate RMB 16.15 tn (+16.8%)** and **Retail RMB 8.65 tn (+5.1%)** [3].
- **Deposits (FY2023)**: RMB **33.52 tn**, +12.2% YoY; CASA 41% [3]. The deposit base is the "customer" side of the franchise — hundreds of millions of retail savers and SOE/corporate operating accounts.
- Retail NPL ratio 0.70% vs Corporate NPL ratio 1.81% at FY2023 — retail credit quality is materially better, but Property NPL ratio at 5.37% (FY2023) is the stress point in the corporate book [5].

## 3. "Suppliers" — Capital and Funding Providers

For a bank, the equivalent of "suppliers" is the providers of funding, capital, and shareholder support.

### a) Equity capital — Major shareholders (the supplier of capital)

Per CLSA's July 2024 ICBC NDR takeaways:
- **Central Huijin (the sovereign wealth holding vehicle under CIC) — 34.7%**
- **Ministry of Finance (MOF) — 34.6%** [4]

→ The Chinese state directly controls **~69%** of ICBC's equity through these two entities. ICBC's "supplier" of capital is, in effect, the central government. This is also why ICBC's strategic asset/liability decisions (deposit rate cuts, sovereign-bond support, LGFV refinancing) tend to align with PBOC/State Council policy.

### b) Funding supply (the deposit / interbank / bond side)

- **Customer deposits** are by far the largest funding source — RMB 33.5 tn at FY2023 [3]. Within that, retail and SOE corporate operating deposits dominate; CASA at 41% reflects a stable, low-cost franchise.
- **Interbank market and PBOC** — ICBC, as China's largest bank, is a net liquidity provider to smaller banks via the interbank market and is a primary counterparty of the People's Bank of China (open-market operations, MLF, reserve requirements). PBOC effectively acts as the marginal supplier/absorber of system liquidity.
- **Bondholders** — ICBC issues large volumes of Tier-2 capital bonds, perpetual bonds, and TLAC-eligible senior bonds; Chinese insurers (Ping An, China Life, etc.) and state-owned investors are the dominant buyers.

### c) Sell-side coverage and ratings (research-side context)

CLSA rates ICBC (1398 HK) **O-PF with a target price of HK$5.20**, and ICBC-A (601398 CH) **O-PF with TP RMB6.70**, with coverage transferred to Ding Luo as of June 2025 [6]. The bank is consistently a CLSA top pick in China financials owing to its high dividend yield (7.6–8.8% range in 2023–2026CL [5]) and stable asset quality.

---

## 4. What ICBC Does NOT Publicly Disclose

Important caveats for an investor framing this as a "customers and suppliers" question:

- **Named top-10 loan customers**: ICBC, like all large Chinese banks, does NOT publish a list of individual top borrowers by name in its annual report. Disclosure is by industry only [1].
- **Named technology / service vendors**: not publicly disclosed. Within China, ICBC operates large in-house IT (ICBC Software Development Center) and uses domestic infrastructure partners (Huawei, Alibaba Cloud, Inspur, ZTE — public knowledge but not in the annual report's customer/supplier disclosures).
- **Named largest depositors**: not disclosed individually — only aggregate by customer type (corporate vs personal).

If you specifically need a named-counterparty mapping (e.g., for KYC, credit, or supply-chain risk), that level of data is not available from internal CLSA notes or ICBC's public filings; it would require commercial private databases (e.g., Wind/Choice corporate-disclosure scrapes or Bloomberg's BICS counterparty data).

---

**Sources**

[1] Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (1398-CN) — Annual Report FY2024 (Distribution of Corporate Loans of Domestic Branches by Industry of Loan Customers)
[2] Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited — FY2020 Annual Report (Loans by industry distribution)
[3] CLSA — "China banks (First glance at state bank results)", 27-Mar-2024 — ICBC FY23 results snapshot (P&L, B/S, asset quality table) — 607925352LinqAlpha.PDF
[4] CLSA — "ICBC – O-PF (NDR takeaways)", 18-Jul-2024 — Major shareholders block — 607934099LinqAlpha.PDF
[5] CLSA — "China banks (First glance at state bank results)", 27-Mar-2024 — ICBC P&L and asset quality detail — 607925352LinqAlpha.PDF
[6] CLSA — "China financials (Get the money in)", 23-Jan-2025 — Companies mentioned / ratings list — 607948869LinqAlpha.PDF

## Citations

- [1] **Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (1398-CN) - Annual Report for period end 31-Dec-2024 (English) - PDF - 1 / 2** · external
- [2] **Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited, H2 2020 Report** · external
- [3] **607925352LinqAlpha.PDF** · clsa — <s3://ext-linq-rms-clsa/2024/03/607925352LinqAlpha.PDF>
- [4] **607934099LinqAlpha.PDF** · clsa — <s3://ext-linq-rms-clsa/2024/07/607934099LinqAlpha.PDF>
- [5] **607925352LinqAlpha.PDF** · clsa — <s3://ext-linq-rms-clsa/2024/03/607925352LinqAlpha.PDF>
- [6] **607948869LinqAlpha.PDF** · clsa — <s3://ext-linq-rms-clsa/2025/01/607948869LinqAlpha.PDF>

