Education
Yang Mingsheng was educated locally.
明生 杨
Yang Mingsheng was educated locally.
Yang started his career at ABC in 1980. After serving as the director of the Department of Industry Credit, he was appointed president of the Tianjin Branch. In 2001, Yang was promoted to deputy secretary of the Chinese Communist Party as well as the vice president of ABC. In the following year, he took on the responsibility of implementing new growth strategies for the ABC. In 2003, Yang was officially appointed by the Chinese State Council as the president of ABC. In 2007, he left his post to become the vice chairman of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission, which is also under the supervision of the Chinese State Council.
Yang’s four-year experience of reforming ABC’s business operations caught the attention of many observers. When Yang took the leadership position in 2003, the bank had a very poor balance sheet and the ratio of non-performing loans (NPL) was 30.07 percent, 4 percent higher than the weighted average NPL (26.12 percent) of the four biggest state-owned commercial banks in China. However, through Yang’s hard work, ABC earned RMB5.8 billion profit in 2005 and the operational income effectively covered new risks.
It was Yang’s leadership and efforts on the reform of the bank’s systems that enabled the turn-around. Under Yang, in 2003 ABC implemented four major projects, risk management, after-loan management, science and technological innovation, and cultivation of talent. To achieve the desired outcome and to meet the requirements of the projects, Deloitte Huayong Accounting Firm was invited to monitor financial statements in all ABC branches. Meanwhile, ABC also invited Mercer Consulting to help them on HR management reform. Yang set out three steps by which ABC should accomplish its reform goals: the first step was to optimize the customer base and to cultivate high quality human resources within the bank, to enlarge the influence of each outlet and to increase valid capital, to enhance internal management performance and to improve ABC’s market value; the second step was to reduce the ratio of non-performing loans, realize capital adequacy management and prepare for listing through ABC’s own efforts and with government support; the last step was to build up ABC as a financial corporation with high quality service and strong market competence.
Although the other three state-owned commercial banks had successfully gone public, ABC had its own unique context and challenges. Many worried that reform of the ABC would reduce access to loans for China’s rural areas. However, Yang believed that ABC should play a major role in Chinese rural development and that it could benefit from the country’s growing agriculture industry. With positive and favorable policy changes for rural development, in many areas ABC has become the main driving force for economic growth. Concerning ABC’s reform, Yang believes that the ABC employees should identify the differences between the ABC and other state-owned commercial banks and control the ABC reform pace. As one of the biggest state-owned commercial banks, ABC has its obligation to follow the policy given by the central government and set a good example to the public (Sina.com, 2006). Many believe that it was Yang’s determination and devotion that brought about the great success of the Agriculture Bank of China over recent years, and there is reason to believe Yang could achieve further career success in his new post at the State Insurance Regulatory Commission.