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on the evening of august 28, citic bank released its 2024 interim report, and employee changes were also disclosed.

financial report data shows that as of the end of june 2024, citic bank (group level data, the same below) had a total of 63,821 employees, while as of the end of 2023, the number of employees was 66,891.

this means that within half a year, citic bank reduced its staff by 3,070 people.

calculated based on the total number of employees at the end of last year, the staff reduction rate is 4.6%, which is relatively high among the listed banks that have disclosed their interim reports.

in its financial report, china citic bank divides its employees into two categories: contract employees and dispatched and employed agreement employees. among them, contract employees account for about 99%, which are usually called "formal employees". at the end of last year, the data of these two categories of employees were 66,057 and 834 respectively; by the end of june this year, the data of these two categories of employees were 63,017 and 804 respectively.

the number of contract employees decreased by 3,040, while the number of dispatched and employed employees decreased by only 30. this shows that the main force of the reduction in the number of employees in citic bank in the past six months was the "regular employees".

jintong news agency noted that this is exactly the opposite of what pudong development bank did. pudong development bank divides its employees into practitioners and service outsourcing personnel, and the layoff rate of service outsourcing personnel is much higher than that of practitioners. data shows that the layoff rate of practitioners is 1.9%, while the layoff rate of outsourced personnel is 16%, which is 8.4 times that of practitioners.

some industry insiders analyzed that from the perspective of reducing costs, laying off regular employees can reduce costs more, because generally speaking, the average salary of regular employees is higher than that of dispatched or outsourced employees. however, laying off dispatched or outsourced employees is relatively easier, and the severance pay is relatively lower. this may explain the two different approaches to reducing staff.

but what is surprising is that after reducing its staff by 3,070, citic bank's employee expenses increased instead of decreasing, from 16.179 billion yuan in the first half of last year to 17.160 billion yuan in the first half of this year, an increase of 1 billion yuan and a year-on-year growth of 6.06%.

this also led to citic bank's business and management expenses in the first half of this year being 29.795 billion yuan, an increase of 1.738 billion yuan year-on-year, a year-on-year increase of 6.19%.

as a result of the chain reaction, in the first half of this year, china citic bank's cost-to-income ratio was 27.33%, an increase of 0.90 percentage points year-on-year.

so why did the staff reduction increase the staff costs? where did the money go? did the employees who stayed get a raise?

further analysis revealed that the truth was not as simple as just giving salary increases to employees who stayed.

in the first half of this year, the direct salaries received by citic bank, that is, the "wages, bonuses, allowances and subsidies" item in the financial report, did not increase or decrease, but decreased from 11.919 billion yuan in the same period last year to 11.492 billion yuan.

however, other items of employee costs, such as social insurance premiums, employee welfare expenses, housing provident funds, and even union funds and employee education funds have increased. for example, social insurance premiums increased from 735 million yuan to 1.368 billion yuan.

it is worth noting that the "post-employment benefits - defined contribution plan" in employee costs increased from 1.543 billion yuan in the same period last year to 2.138 billion yuan.

but reducing staff is not the goal, but creating value for employees, shareholders and society. the interim report shows that china citic bank achieved operating income of 109.019 billion yuan in the first half of the year, up 2.68% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders of the company was 35.490 billion yuan, down 1.60% year-on-year; non-performing loan ratio was 1.19%, up 0.01 percentage point from the end of last year; provision coverage ratio was 206.76%, down 0.83 percentage point from the end of last year; it plans to implement interim dividends, with a cash dividend of 1.847 yuan per 10 shares; the dividend ratio will be further increased to 29.20% of the net profit of ordinary shareholders.