Earnings will recover this year, but not much, with weak loan growth, lower fee income growth and continued hefty provisions to rebuild its cushion. At the same time, valuation is cheap enough to keep it a Buy.
Modest loan growth target, despite benefiting the most from rising public investment. In line with its GDP growth forecast, KTB targets 2016 loan growth of 3-4% (vs. SCBS' forecast of 4%), little changed from 3.8% in 2015. Most of the growth this year will come from SME loans, and it plans to shift into lower gear for housing loans to control asset quality. KTB is in the best position to benefit from accelerating public investment, which should provide upside to its loan growth target.
Easing fee income growth. KTB expects fee income growth to decelerate to 10% in 2016F from 15% in 2015, with no repetition of the 2015 hike in commission rate charge on bancassurance to Krungthai-AXA Life Insurance. We lower our 2016F fee income growth forecast to 10percent from 12% to fine tune with its guidance.
Rebuilding LLR coverage. KTB plans to rebuild its LLR coverage back to 125% by YE2016, where it was prior to reclassifying SSI loans as NPLs. The reclassification of the SSI loans as NPLs cut its LLR coverage to 102% in 3Q15 from 125% in 2Q15. KTB rebuilt this to 112.5% in 4Q15 at a hefty credit cost of 1.75% in 4Q15. The bank expects its NPL ratio to stabilize in 2016 as NPL formation steps down. We, however, expect NPLs to continue to rise in 2016, albeit at a slower pace than in 2015. Though it will not have to make extra provisions for SSI loans, we expect credit cost to remain high at 1.35% (Bt28.5bn) in 2016F, down slightly from 1.5% (Bt30.5bn) in 2015 as it works to build its LLR coverage back to 125% at YE2016.
3-stage transformation journey. KTB has outlined a journey to transformation in three stages. In the first stage (2014-2015), the goal was to strengthen its foundation and defend its core business. In the second stage (2016-2018), the goal is to close the performance gaps (profitability, market share, and capability) with peers. In the final phase (2019-2021), the aim is to make KTB the best in digital banking. KTB completed a transformation program for retail and SME business in 2015 and hopes this will bring an improvement in its cost to income ratio in 2016. We have left this out of our projection as we expect top lines to be dragged down by the prolonged slowdown in the economy. The bank has not yet provided a clear program as to how it will close the performance gap with its peers. We are concerned that the effort to make it the best digital bank will mandate large capex for IT upgrade and a rise in cost to income ratio.
Maintain Buy. KTB is in the best position to benefit as public investment gets into higher gear. It is trading at a discounted valuation with a PER below 8x and 0.9x PBV for 2016F relative to 12% ROE (-1SD below historical mean), which already discounts asset quality concerns and weak loan demand.