Good afternoon. Today is the CITIC Limited 2024 full-year results briefing. So before the briefing, please mute your mobile phone. Thank you. The briefing will be carried out in Mandarin. We are providing simultaneous interpretation in English and Cantonese.
In English and Cantonese. So if you need a headset, please raise your hand. And English is on channel two, and Cantonese is on channel three. [Foreign language]
Now I would like to introduce you to the management team: Chairman Mr. Xi Guohua, Vice Chairman, President Mr. Zhang Wenwu, Executive Director, Vice President Mr. Liu Zhengjun, Executive Director, Vice President Mr. Wang Guoquan, Vice President Mr. Fang Heying, Vice President Mr. Zeng Qi, General Manager of Financial Management Department Mr. Zhang Xuejun. Now, we would like to have Mr. Zhang Xuejun introduce us to the full-year results of CITIC Limited 2024, and the management team will take questions.
Dear investors, analysts, and friends from the media, and our friends of CITIC, good afternoon. Now I would like to brief you about the overall performance of CITIC Limited. One of the first key words is that we have made steady growth, which involves we could see these financial results that revenue, net profit, and profit attributable to the ordinary shareholders.
Last year, affected by the geopolitical tensions and trade protectionism, global economic growth slowed. The Chinese economy also faced challenges such as insufficient effective demand, weak social sentiment, and underlying risks. However, positive long-term supporting factors and fundamental trends remained unchanged. Facing pressures from the internal and external environment, CITIC Limited adhered to the general principle of seeking steady advancement to promote resilience, and so we have maintained steady growth, so here we could see the revenue reached CNY 752.9 billion, up by 10.6%.
And the full-year consolidation of the Nanjing Steel contributed CNY 57.7 billion, and expansion of the existing business contributed CNY 14.4 billion, accounting 8.5% and 2.1%, respectively. The profit attributable to ordinary shareholders reached CNY 58.2 billion, up by 1.1%, so let's take a look about the segment. We have the financial segment and non-financial segment. For financial segment, that is, recorded revenue and profit.
For non-financial segment, demonstrated resilience. We've established a coordinated and differentiated development framework, advancing the financial core initiative and creating the CITIC model of five major tasks. We could see that 4.3% of the growth in revenue and profit. Also we elaborate more. In terms of the non-financial segments, grew to 14.7% and contracted 2.4% year on year, respectively. Here we could see for advanced manufacturing, that revenue and profit grew 0.7% and 4.6%. For advanced materials and Nanjing Steel, that actually we've already consolidated Nanjing Steel, and therefore here we could see that we still drove 21.7%. We've overcome the impact of the commodity price fluctuations and reduction in iron ore production and maintained a profit about CNY 10 billion.
The New Consumption strengthened market development and transformation efforts, but was affected by the domestic auto market price war and downturn in the Brazilian seed market, and for new type urbanization, we've already made quite good progress, that is, 137.4% in revenue and also in profit, and so here, when we look at about a dividend payout ratio, and we've already rolled out a three-year plan for the shareholders' return plan, committed to steadily increasing the dividend payout ratio, so last year, we could see that we've already made it up to 27.5%, and so here we could see that actually, at the end of 2024, the company proposed a final dividend of CNY 0.36 per share, with the full-year dividend reaching CNY 0.55 per share, so that's a 6.8% growth against 2023. Therefore, the dividend payout ratio already reached up to 27.5%.
As I recall, actually in August 2014, we could see that dividend payout ratio increased. Actually, we could see that's twice the amount, and so here we could see that inter-year high of the CITIC Limited share price, that is, HKD 11.8, and so that's already outperformed the Hang Seng Index and also Hang Seng Composite Index. So that would be the full-year growth consecutively, and here, I also would like to touch on some of the rapid growth. The first one, that is, the overseas revenue was CNY 113.7 billion, and so here we could see at the end of the year, that overseas assets were CNY 1.15 trillion, and so here we could see that both accounts exceeded the company's overall growth rate of 10.6% and 6.6%, respectively, and the proportion of the overseas revenue grew 1.4% to 15.1%.
And so I will share with you about the performance in terms of the CITIC Dicastal and CITIC Heavy Industries, because those segments actually drive the development of the overseas business. And the second feature, that is, the growing technology investment, which actually laid a solid foundation for our sustainable development. So our company adheres to the innovation-driven high-quality development. So last year, the company invested CNY 25.2 billion in the technology. So we could see the R&D investment continued to be enhanced. And another key feature that is, we could see last year, S&P upgraded CITIC Limited long-term issuer credit rating from to A- , which is a stable outlook. So marking the highest level since 2016. And they give us a very good foundation. And now I will walk you through the business segments. The first part is comprehensive financial services.
For this part, that actually we give a very good use of the CITIC platforms. Here we could see the financial sector actually reached a revenue of CNY 279.469 billion, and the profit was CNY 52.649 billion. We have to say that we make full use of our advantage of the full suite of financial license and full-cycle comprehensive services. The second advantage, that is, CITIC's innovative and collaborative risk resolution model led to the continuous risk reduction, and especially in the key areas such as real estate and local government funding vehicles. That would be a very typical feature. We continue to mitigate the risks in real estate. In the financial service, the first one is CITIC Bank . We could see the revenue reached CNY 213.2 billion. The profit was CNY 68.6 billion, up by 3.7% and 2.3%.
CITIC Bank actually was one of the banks that made positive growth in both revenue and profit. And so here, when we look at about this net interest margin, that we could see that the annual net interest margin down only 1% to 1.77%. And for the non-performing loan ratio was 1.16%, down 0.02 percentage points. And so here we could see we further enhanced our asset quality and resilience to withstand risks. And another one, that is, we have actually reached 99.9% conversion of the RMB 40 billion convertible bonds. So we have a quite good capital adequacy ratio. And then CITIC Securities made a revenue of CNY 63.8 billion and a profit of CNY 21.7 billion. So up by 62% and 10.1%, respectively, year on year. And so we could see that we still had a very solid industry-leading position in China.
We maintained a leading position in terms of the domestic equity and bond underwriting value, asset under custody, and asset under management. And so we have to say that actually CITIC Securities actually ranked number one for 19 years consecutively. And another achievement, that is, significant results in overseas expansion. So international business revenues grew by 16%, ranking first in offshore Chinese bond underwriting and second in both Hong Kong equity financing and global M&As by Chinese companies. So this part also made a huge contribution to the overseas growth. And then CITIC Trust, that last year, that made revenues of CNY 5.38 billion and a profit of CNY 2.65 billion. So we could see we continued to optimize the business structure. So the scale of the trust assets grew 27% to CNY 2.6 trillion over the year.
Here we could see that the proportion of the asset trust service encouraged by the regulators rose to 58%. The new trust business revenue grew 13% year on year. We became the industry's leader in the scale of existing charitable trust. We also resolved underlying risks. The asset quality of the property and business remains stable. Just what we've mentioned, the project in Shanghai was also a very good case. Another one is CITIC-Prudential Life. We proactively manage growth headwinds in new business and in new industry evolution. We are able to have the new business value reached CNY 2.82 billion up 16% year on year. We further strengthened financial positions. Another capital contribution of CNY 1.25 billion from each JV partners had greatly improved the comprehensive solvency adequacy.
Then we move on to the advanced intelligence and manufacturing. Last year, we made a revenue of CNY 50.793 billion and a profit of CNY 865 million. Here we could see that we have made continuous efforts in expanding the overseas business and optimized the structure, which made a huge contribution to the growth. We also strengthened critical technology research, achieved breakthroughs in key projects, and won multiple national awards. In this segment, we have CITIC Dicastal and CITIC Heavy Industries, all leasing companies. For the CITIC Dicastal, aluminum wheel sales up 4% year on year and casting sales up 6.5% year on year. We made the market breakthrough that we have already integrated the technologies. We manufacture China's largest 7,500 tonnes two-plate die-casting machine, producing the world's first heavy-duty integrated casting for the automotive industry.
Further improved the overseas production network, the Mexico aluminum casting facility was in full operations in 2024, while the construction of the Morocco factory, Africa's first Global Lighthouse, was completed in eight months. And CITIC Heavy Industries grew significantly and grew by about 28.7%, with new effective orders of RMB 15 billion. And also in terms of the R&D investments, we maintained a 7% input of spending of the total revenue. So that is the part about the intelligent manufacturing.
Now, I'm going to talk about the advanced materials, and we are going to continue to expand the overseas mineral resource development and to enhance the connections with the upstream and downstream industries to secure strategic resources supply and strengthen the collaboration in procurements, production, sales, and management, allowing two special steel companies to leverage each other's customer bases and establishing networking, differentiating product segments, and thereby enhancing the brand influence. So in terms of the advanced materials, there are two subsidiaries: CITIC Pacific Special Steel. Last year, the steel industry suffered a loss of close to 40%. And also the profits declined by about 40%, more than 40%. But whatever, you look at the subsidiary CITIC, they perform better than the industry.
CITIC Pacific Special Steel has stable sales and realized revenue of RMB 109.2 billion, profits of RMB 5.1 billion, down 4.2% and 10.4% year on year, respectively, outperforming peers. We can see that the ultra-high-steel and stainless specialty steel products were up 23% year on year. We also strengthened the technological innovation reserves. R&D spending grew by about 0.31 percentage points year on year to 4.21% as well, with 476 patents registered throughout 2024. We also deepened the AI applications in business use cases, with Xingcheng Special Steel becoming the first of the special steel industry to pass the level four assessment of the maturity model of the intelligent manufacturing capacity. Nangang Steel realized a revenue of RMB 61.8 billion and profit of RMB 2.3 billion, down 14.8% and up 6.4% year on year, respectively. Operating performance remained stable.
Core products of the advanced steel materials continued to increase in volume, with the annual sales of 2.6149 million tonnes accounting for 28% of the total steel profits. Profit margin grew to about 1.14 percentage points year on year to 17.17%. Accelerated the advancement of the global layout, actively expanded in the overseas markets, with the annual exports exceeding 1.5 million tonnes up 25%. Completed the installation of a key module of its first overseas 6.5 million-tonne capacity coking coal facility. The third subsidiary, CITIC Metal, public company in mainland China, realized revenue of RMB 132 billion and profit of RMB 2.2 billion of 4.2% and 8.8% year on year, respectively. First of all, market position in the metal trading remained stable, adjusting its business structure and expanding the non-ferrous business based on the market trends.
In particular, scale and profit of the copper trading were up 9% and 163% year on year, respectively, both hitting record highs. Prominent results in overseas mineral investments. Ivanhoe KK Copper Mine Phase 3 and Kipushi Zinc Mine achieved the commercial production ahead of schedule and are on the way to becoming the world's third largest copper mine and the fourth largest zinc mine in terms of annual production at a full capacity production. Realized a notable disposal gain of 1% Alcoa shares at favorable prices. CITIC Resources realized revenues of HKD 9.5 billion and profit of HKD 570 million, up 148% and 3.8% year on year, respectively. A chief breakthrough in oil and gas trade and increased the trading volume of 9.5 million barrels of crude oil in 2024.
Completion of the major transactions covered the entire AWC equity interest to Alcoa shares, resulting in the increase of the after-tax profits. Now, let's look at the New Consumption segment. New Consumption proactively responded to the market changes and also positive revenues in its leading segments and also responded to the Brazilian seed markets and also the domestic auto price wars and the annual performance decline due to the Chinese domestic auto price wars in the Brazilian seed markets. As to the New Consumption market, CITIC Telecom International had two points. The Macau 5G users increased by about 51% and maintained a very strong growth momentum, with market share increasing to 53.3%, finally holding up the top position in Macau's mobile market. Launched 5.5G commercial services, making Macau one of the first cities globally to offer the 5.5G commercial services.
Further expansion into Southeast Asian markets and cooperation with renowned international hardware suppliers to provide server deployments for local customers in Singapore. For CITIC Press, realized revenues of about RMB 1.69 billion, down 1.7% year on year, profit of about RMB 120 million, up 2%. There are two points. First of all, we launched the CITIC Smart Publishing City, responded to the sluggish publishing market and the direction of the new media channels by leveraging AI to empower and upgrade its content, e-commerce, and effectively control the overall sales cost and discount rate, with a gross profit margin up by about 4.09 PP. Secondly, the brand influence also improved.
We deepened the strategic focus on animation and comic creative industries and strengthened the IP collaborations and maintained the leading position in China's retail market for journal books, securing the leading position in market share of management, self-help , and biography book, and about achieving 3.79% and ranking first. Now, Longping High-Tech. Also under the New Consumption segment. We are the biggest shareholder for Longping High-Tech, and we want to stabilize the revenue. We also expanded the market of the specialized, refined, differential, and innovative, and high value-added varieties in addition to the stable operation of the three main grain crops in rice, corn, and wheat, of which the rice revenue grew by about 10%. Brazilian corn seeds business market share exceeded 21%. We accelerated innovation momentum.
78 new varieties attained national approval, further improving the layout of the green high-quality and high-yield varieties with the independently cultivated Wei Liangyou 8612, setting a new national record for annual yield of the rice. Dah Chong Hong, facing the market changes, we have further expanded the overseas market and actively expanded the export of Chinese vehicles to the overseas market. Sales volume of about 100,000 units, up 1.1% year on year. New type urbanization achieved revenues of about RMB 46.987 billion and profit of about RMB 5.135 billion in 2024, up 8.3% and 137.4%. We capitalized on the opportunities across the Belt and Road Initiative and also with this pressure from the real estate market, and we focused on project delivery and receivables settlements and reducing provisions over the year against the real estate sector downward pressure. And segment revenue grew against downward trends.
Key projects such as Jade Mansion Wuxi, Jade Mansion Suzhou, and Changsha Longping were successfully delivered, driving the property development revenue up 40% to about RMB 14.7 billion. High-quality delivery of the residential properties, such as the five projects including the Mansion de Verre Yangzhou, Jinlin Century Yangzhou, Jinyue Mansion Yangzhou and Jade Mansion Suzhou , all exceeded 90%, demonstrating strong operational management and customer service capacity, so construction and urban operations [had] breakthroughs in overseas markets such as signed a batch of major projects including the social housing projects in Saudi Arabia and Uzbek H ighway reconstructions.
A nd also we signed contract volume up 75% year on year to RMB 30.7 billion and also the TKU expressway renovation projects in Kazakhstan was fully opened to traffic, becoming the north-south traffic artery for the eastern state of Kazakhstan, Wuhan, and Jiangshan sewage treatment plants, and also the National Green and Low Carbon Benchmark sewage treatment plants.
These are the major projects that we developed for in this segment. Okay, that was my presentation. Thank you for your kind attention. Moving forward, we are going to open up the floor for questions. Before you ask a question, please identify your organization and your name. Now, the first one, George.
I would like to thank the management executives for the report. I'm from [Citi]. My name is [George Choi]. I have two questions. So in the economic concept, the concept of the high dividends attract a lot of market attention. CITIC has been improving the dividend payout ratio. Last year, CITIC also published a plan for returns for shareholders. So what are the plans for the dividend payouts at your company? Secondly, and the market value.
There's a lot of priority given to the market value of the state-owned companies, and the regulatory organizations have published some regulations about market value. In terms of the market value management, what kind of new work has your company done? And what do you think of the market value of CITIC? Thank you.
Thank you for your questions. First of all, let me answer your first question. CITIC attaches great importance to giving dividends and payback to our shareholders. We pay dividends twice per year. We have stable dividend payouts with increase, stable increase. So we have been a public company for 10 years. Accumulatively, we had HKD dividends, HKD 120 billion, and also the dividend rate yield was 7%. So we have been quite popular because of our dividend yields.
In 2024, we published a plan for paying back to our shareholders in 2026. Dividend payout rate will not be lower than 30%. In 2024, will not be lower than 27%. 2025, dividend payout rate will not be lower than 28%. The Board of Directors also decided that in 2024, the dividend payout rate will be increased to 27.5%, increased by about 1.5 percentage points. So annual dividend yield was CNY 0.55 per share, grew by 6.8% year over year. It shows that CITIC Limited is committed to honoring our commitments, and we will go beyond the expectations. Moving forward, we are going to adopt stable, sustainable dividend policies. While improving our business performance, we will also enhance our payback to the shareholders. We believe that in the future, we will surpass your, exceed your expectations as well.
I would like to take on your questions in terms of the market performance and what's our next step. Actually, since this year, we could see that the market value of CITIC Limited grew by 27.5%. In the past four years, the accumulated growth point already reached 124%. We have maintained a quite stable growth, and we still believe that there is still room for us to improve. I would like to respond to you based on the three perspectives. The first one, CITIC Limited will seize the opportunities of the tailwinds of the macro policies. For example, since 2024, the central government actually has already made a resolute decision to turn around the environment. Here we could see there was a portfolio of the policies that are being released.
Therefore, we could see that many international institutions have already improved their expectation on the Chinese economy. CITIC Limited, as a comprehensive company, we believe that we are able to seize those opportunities. From the finance sector, the first three quarters for the three sectors that in China Securities and also CITIC Construction Investment that we seized opportunities, we have already achieved the revenue that needs to be done by a year. You could see that the revenue of the CITIC Securities actually and revenue grew by 6.2% and then 10% growth in terms of profit. We have also carried out effective ways to resolve the real estate risks. In terms of the NPL of the banking system, has been well controlled as well.
And for example, in terms of the science and technology that in recent years that in China, that the AI technology development and application has been speed up. And the CITIC Limited actually makes full use of the diversified industrial application. So CITIC actually has already worked with DeepSeek, and we are going to focus on more cooperation in terms of the upgrade of the computing power and the use of the AI-based application. And so that actually gives us a lot of opportunities. And so in CITIC, we could see we have the comprehensive advantage because we have the CITIC financial services. We have equity. We also have bonds, and we have a wide range of the financial services. And so we are quite sensitive and keen to the market changes. And for example, last year, there was a very public DeepSeek and also Yushu Technology.
These are the companies that are growing quite great. These companies actually are within the scope of our key account. We made quite a good return on top of that. In terms of the consumption sector, CITIC also has done a good job. For example, we seized opportunity. For example, there was a hit with the film and animation Nezha 2 . CITIC Press also worked with Nezha to publish the books. Our sales volume of those books already being sold out up to 1.7 million copies. All of those results actually achieved within one or two months. That's remarkable. These are the favorable policies and also environments that in China. Each segment of the CITIC Group will seize those opportunities. Secondly, CITIC will continue to deepen the reform and improve the refined management.
So actually, since last year, we've already streamlined our management and operation. And so we'll keep our structure more streamlined. And we will also improve the refined management of the equity management. And we take on a proactive role to resolve the risks in terms of the real estate. Actually, last year, we've already lowered that risk point by 0.7%. And we could see those kinds of risk-resolving policies have been proved quite good. And so we've already optimized our system management mechanism and also already witnessed some of the favorable results. And we also continuously controlled the refined management of the procurement process. We lowered the procurement cost. And we also focused on the expense control. So we are able to make sure a very reasonable growth of the cost compared to the revenue growth.
So all of these actions will put CITIC Limited on the right track and to be more practical. And this year, we also believe that we would like to focus on our priority. So from the strategic perspective, we will focus on about our top line design and also to optimize our business structure. And we focus on those resources in the financial sector and also to make deployment in terms of the emerging sectors to make CITIC more resilient and to generate more potential. And thirdly, we will continue to enhance our communication mechanism with the capital market. So we believe that actually we have quite a complicated business matrix in CITIC Limited. So in the future, we will make more efforts in terms of communications with our investors and also analysts.
So when you look at our each segment, you could see that actually that in 2024, we have a very good growth in terms of revenue and profit and also the credit rating. And so here we could see that the CITIC Bank 's revenue net profit that actually are growing. And even for this, the net interest margin actually outperformed the other market players. And even though for CITIC Securities, we are making tightened pressures, but still we maintain the growth in revenue and net profit. And for CITIC Trust, that we will continue to focus on the transformation.
And we could see that actually for the CITIC Pacific Special Steel, that we only have the 2% of the scale. However, we are able to make a very good growth point. And we also have the CITIC Metal, CITIC Resources, and Sino Iron. And these companies are developing very good.
We also will seize the market opportunities. This year, we also make some change in terms of annual reports. We have added more detailed information in annual report. We hope that that will help investors to better understand the advantages of CITIC Limited so that they could have a clear understanding for CITIC Limited and so as they could have a better understanding in terms of the market valuation. We also will take on the suggestions from the capital market and to put into our daily management and development. Considering the macro environment and the stable business of the CITIC Limited and high dividend ratio, dividend payout ratio, we believe we have a big potential in terms of the market value. Next question.
I'm Yan Haiyang. I'm from HSBC. I have two questions. The first one, that is, could you share with us what's the progress and results of the deepening reform and opening up? And the second question is about going global strategy because that in your slides, you also share about the macro environment because of the geopolitical tensions and also the protectionism. And so there will be some new challenges and risks. And how would you respond to those risks?
Thank you very much. And for your question, let me take on the first question. CITIC is actually growing along with the reform and opening up. And therefore, on a new starting point of the deepening reform and opening up, we will continue to enhance our core competitiveness. I will share with you that four measures and the results.
The first one, that we are driven by the core projects and we made financial sector and financial services that are outperforming the market, so we make full use of our resources in financial services. And so we have built a global competitive financial system, so we focus on our functions and features and also seize opportunities, so my colleagues already mentioned that in the banking business, we have five leading the market strategy. And so as that, we have already improved that in terms of the revenue, net profit. And we have proposed ourselves to make the CITIC Bank as the first-class investment bank. And so we will continue to consolidate our leading positions. That our capability in serving the entities has been further enhanced. That we have already made innovative financial service model that should provide full-cycle financial solutions to the scientific and startups.
And so here, we've already provided our financial services to 96% of those in specialized and innovative businesses in China. And we also received 12 awards in terms of the Fintech development. So that number of the awards actually already outperformed the other players. And secondly, we focus on the star supply chain project to promote the transformation of those manufacturing. So we believe that each sector needs to have its star company. And so we carry out three key actions. The first one, that is the star transformation in traditional industry. That is to focus on the high-end development, smart development, and green development. We are dedicated to cultivate more leading industries in various sectors. And in terms of the aluminum wheels and also special wheels, we've already built up three lighthouse factories around the world.
We also have many factories that are already being selected as the first batch of the super smart factory. So we believe that one company is a product. So a company as a product concept has been built on across CITIC Limited. So we will focus on our industrial integration capabilities to focus on the more investment and also the withdrawal. In emerging industries, we have a star creation campaign focusing on some new segments for development. We have put in place some highly effective strategic investment matrix. And we have focused on industry research and also screening process. And we are managing a fund worth more than CNY 300 billion. We have more than 1,000 companies in our investment incubators. Companies such as Yushu Technology is among the batch of the high-tech company that we support.
This year, we are going to focus on technology value, technology attributes and properties, and emerging domains, and also areas that can bring some breakthroughs. We are going to have some investment and mergers and acquisitions in this segment. Secondly, we have two securities brokerage. We have our own advantages. We are forward-looking, and we're going to focus on future-looking equipment, futuristic materials, and further improve our mechanism for industry investment and nurture stars for the future. Thirdly, we are going to have more synergy in terms of the risk management, and we work hard to reduce the risk. Also, we manage the risk in real estate and local liabilities. In 2024, we have reorganization and restructuring projects that are worth CNY 23.9 billion. For the project, we have cash return worth CNY 12.9 billion. So the non-performing rates in the real estate and local government liabilities declined.
So fourthly, we're going to deepen international collaboration. So CITIC is a window for reform and opening up. In this new triumph age, we would like to serve as a bridge connecting to the Belt and Road. In the future, we will strive to become a rising flag in terms of implementing national strategies. Last year, we had a slogan saying that if you want to go global, you should come to CITIC. If you come to China to make investments, CITIC is the go-to brand. So we successfully organized some global events and also German advanced manufacturing events and tour in Chongqing and CITIC's strategic East Lake investment. And also we organized foreign companies to go to Nanjing and Guangdong Province to attend the events. We would like to attract more new productive forces to come to China.
CITIC also attaches great importance to the unique advantages of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, we are going to accelerate the development of headquarter economy and cross-border innovation model, new productive forces, epicenter. So we work in partnership with Hong Kong Polytechnic. We created an AI innovative center together. In addition, corporate social responsibility will be given priority in this region as well. We are going to give full support to our branches in Hong Kong and enhance our influence in Hong Kong and create more value in Hong Kong. Based on Hong Kong, we are going to accelerate and expand collaboration and collaboration. Last year, in 2024, the overseas project, a newly signed contract volume and newly effective contract volume grew by about 2.5x and 1.8x . Equipment export orders increased by 80%. CITIC Securities international revenues grew by about 41% year on year.
Net profit almost doubled. Achieved double growth. So taking advantage of the 14th Five-Year Plan of China, we are going to give full play to our own potential and work on innovation and improve our functionalities and competencies, and also focus on high-quality development space as well.
Thank you. Okay. Next up, I'm going to talk about the internationalization. Internationalization has been our traditional advantage. It has been our long-term strategic orientation. Ever since day one, we have been serving as a window to the outside world. Over the past 45 years, we have been upholding concepts and principles of opening up and reform. We made international funds. We proactively get integrated into the globalization trends. We have built good word of mouth and put in place professional teams. We can cover the whole industry chain with our own permanent advantages.
Our overseas business coverage can reach more than 160 countries and regions. By the end of 2024, our overseas business assets and revenues both increased. Overseas assets amounted to RMB 1.15 trillion, grew by 13.7%, accounting for 0.6% of the total assets. The overseas revenues surpassed more than RMB 100 billion, grew by about 21.8% year on year. Overseas revenue, accounting for 15.1%, grew by 1.4 percentage points year on year. Chairman Xi also mentioned that internationalization is part of our deep reform campaign based on our 40 years of experience with international development. We are going to focus on development routes and regional focus and supporting mechanisms. We are going to have further development in Hong Kong and Macau and further internationalization. Going global competitiveness will be further enhanced.
Last year, in October, we have a slogan saying that if you want to go global, CITIC is the go-to company. If you want to come to China to make investment, CITIC is also the go-to company. This will be our dual brand. We are going to offer full industry chain support, providing services, covering products, services, and technologies, and assist Chinese companies in their going global efforts. We are going to introduce more foreign assets and investment to China as well. We have different kinds of platforms and campaigns such as the China Tour, ESG Global Leadership Congress. At this event, we are going to talk about advanced management experience and our advanced models. We are going to enhance our international standing and influence. In terms of the regional selection, we put the different regions into different categories.
We can start with Hong Kong and Macau, which can be an important epicenter for our internationalization efforts. We're going to focus on consolidating our financial advantages and technology innovation investments. We would like to enhance our service capacity in Hong Kong as well. We would like to be well integrated in the Hong Kong financial sector and enhance the city's competencies and provide more services and support to companies' efforts to have IPO or to issue bonds in Hong Kong. We have different kinds of business such as the Hong Kong Shenzhen Stock Exchange Connect and Bond Connect and Exchange Connect. We have different kinds of services. We are going to expand the use scenarios for RMB currency as well.
Also, CITIC Financial Holdings is going to provide different kinds of supporting systems covering the equity and loan and bond insurance business as well. We're going to strengthen our competencies and competitiveness in Hong Kong as well, utilizing the RMB strength and regional geographic strength of Hong Kong. We are going to further expand the business of CITIC Bank and focus on financial innovation and branch out that innovation to the Greater Bay Area. Secondly, we're going to focus on some niche markets such as the Belt and Road Initiative and working together with the emerging economies and developing countries.
We're going to focus on high-quality development, high-quality partnership in the Belt and Road Initiative. We focus on small and beautiful livelihood projects, cross-border finance and industry chain, supply chain technology innovation. We have different kinds of branch offices and representative offices in the Belt and Road initiatives focusing on providing high-quality services.
CITIC Construction now has more newly effective contract value, grew quite significantly year on year. CITIC Metal had a kind of trading plus investment model in Africa and South Africa, such as the CITIC Dicastal in Morocco, the factory was the first of its kind, Lighthouse Factory, and the South America Casting Factory was delivered the first batch of products. CITIC Environment successfully won some bidding. Thirdly, we are going to further expand in the developed economy and deepen our partnerships with our international partners and expand our circle of friends and partners. Last year, we organized the Chongqing Tour for German advanced manufacturing industries. 118 German advanced manufacturing and hidden champion enterprises joined the business matching session. We signed agreements for 13 projects, contract value amounting to RMB 9 billion.
In terms of the supporting mechanisms, we are going to have measures to provide support to the international talents. And we also offer some regional synergy platform. And we are going to strengthen the overseas risk management mechanisms and providing stable support to the going global efforts. Thank you. That was my response. The next question.
Okay. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to ask a question. I am a Citi analyst. My name is Zhou Dongping. I'm going to ask a question about the industry and financing synergy and risk resolution and mitigation. So can you talk about the progress in terms of the projects that your company has? And also, earlier this year, you have the first of its kind, Lighthouse Factory in Africa. In China, we have the third factory. So you have some remarkable accomplishments.
Moving forward, in terms of technology innovation and AI and digitalization, what are the important measures at CITIC?
First of all, let me answer your first question about the risk mitigation, risk resolution in terms of the industry and financial synergy. This is our unique industry innovation model. Through our own efforts, we have made some very good progress in terms of the synergy. We have some unique advantages. I'm going to talk about four aspects. First of all, we need to innovate in terms of business model. Under CITIC, we have some financial subsidiaries. And we have a team for dealing with the risk mitigation. And we have measures to isolate risks. And we also make investments to mobilize the assets. The China CITIC Bank also makes investments in bond financing. And through increasing and growth in these aspects, we can lead to development in other aspects as well.
We also have CITIC Industries subsidiaries. They have strength in terms of the real estate sector. They can manage projects, manage the risk, and they can also deal with their day-to-day operations. We will isolate the risk and then mitigate the risk. We provide services that can cover the whole industry chain by isolating risk and improving the assets, creating more value, empowering brands. Then we will be able to rapidly cash in on our investment and increase the value of our investment. So we could see that actually this risk resolution model is effective because we have a number of the projects already being operated under this model. For example, actually last year, that total asset that is CNY 23 billion. In that year, we already collected CNY 19 billion back. Actually since 2022, we've already reduced those risks up to CNY 82 billion.
We've already revitalized nearly 70 high-risk real estate projects. We've already delivered 66,000 units of the house. For example, last year, the Dongjiadu Project in Shanghai actually opened for 3 times and sold out 3 times . That's really a benchmark case. For example, there were 106 units and then sold out. Since 2022, CITIC Bank has actually worked with the CITIC Urban Development and so as to focus on some of the Kaisa Group's portfolio risk mitigation projects. For example, the Mangrove Bay Project in Shenzhen, which is also one of the Shenzhen Bay projects. Actually, it has not clarified about the use right of the land, which is a historical legacy problem lasted for 20 years. But we already put into construction.
Here we could see that we also have made some other projects. For example, Shenzhen Mangrove Bay projects have already been sold out. The revenue already reached CNY 3.2 billion. Those land-hold owners were quite satisfied with the delivery. These kinds of the industrial finance innovative collaborative risk resolution model is able to segregate risks and to restructure the whole project. In this model, it could ensure the delivery of the house and to ensure the livelihood and ensure the stability. Therefore, this model has been highly recognized by many governments. We do believe that this kind of the model could be copied and pasted in other cities as well. Therefore, CITIC Limited would love to work with the different real estate companies and projects and local governments that should prevent and also mitigate the risks in the real estate.
We believe that we are able to build out the CITIC Limited risk resolution model as one of the benchmarks that to help more and more real estate players and also the local governments that to reduce those risks. Therefore, we will continue to make efforts in that regard. I also would like to answer your questions from a fourth perspective. The first one, that is the scientific innovation, is actually one of our features. Innovation is a part of our DNA. In recent years, that we have witnessed very solid revenue growth. Innovation is one of the engines. Secondly, that you paid a lot of attention about the Lighthouse. We have already made a lot of number one of the Lighthouse. I think Lighthouse Factory is very strong evidence of our strong capability in productivity.
It also showcased about the leading position of CITIC Limited in terms of the digitalization, internationalization, and smart manufacturing. Apart from the Lighthouse, I actually have some figures. For example, last year, that actually we've already invested CNY 25.2 billion in the scientific research and development. And so which accounted 3.34% of our total revenue. We've already had around 110 scientific and technology achievements that already been awarded by the provincial government and the national government. We have already accumulated more than 10,000 valid patents. That means we do have a lot of the profile that in terms of the scientific innovation.
What's the next step?
The next step, that is, we will focus on the high-quality scientific innovation. We will really focus on about the systematic and original innovation.
And therefore, this year, we've already started our Rock Program or Rock C ampaign. We are going to initiate it and to build out a platform of 2 plus 4 plus N. The 2 means that to build a Digital Steel and Smart Mining. These are two key laboratories at the national high-quality level. And the 4 means the Fintech and Biological Breeding, Advanced Functional Materials, and also Lightweight Materials. That's 4. And N refers to a number of the regional level R&D centers. So actually, yesterday, the CITIC Hong Kong's AI Scientific Center has been already officially launched. And in the future, we will continue to develop these kinds of R&D centers in different sectors. And another focus, that is the transformation of those results. We have many application scenarios in CITIC Group.
So how do we give a full play of those scenarios and also to put more industrial applications? So there are key cutting points. The first one, that is AI+ campaign. And the second, that is about the collaboration. And for example, that we have a large number of the subsidiaries that could work together. So a different segment, a different business could work together that to land a large number of scientific research projects. And therefore, when we ensure those research results, we will be actively transformed and practiced and put into use in our frontline production and success. And for example, that CITIC Bank has already built out our large language model and also CITIC Securities also is using these models as well. And of course, the Nanjing Steel also used AI model.
So we believe that all of those AI-based results actually are a part of the contributor to ensure our leading position in the market. And in the future, we will continue to focus on the Fintech and also Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials, Biological Breeding, etc. We need to have a very good integration of the production, education, and also the research. So we will build out such a chain. We will also build out the talent chains. So we've already launched such a Star Action. That means we are going to select around 10 chief scientists and 15 senior experts and 300 young talents. So those experts and those talents are the stars which will help us to create a galaxy of the high-caliber talents. And the fourth point, that is DeepSeek. DeepSeek is quite a hot topic.
And I have to touch on that because that we've already connected with the DeepSeek. So the different scale of the DeepSeek model has been already connected to our system. And so we've already realized those private deployments. So it will help us the upgrade of the smart intelligence in many fields, including that CITIC Bank has already used the AI model that to support multiple scenarios such as the Q&A, wealth management, customer behaviors analysis, and also the training etc. That could help us to save a lot of computing power up to 30%. And we believe that we are able to increase the efficiency. The results are significant. And how about in some other segments?
We also will use the large language model that to empower some traditional sectors such as some other companies such as the CITIC Pacific Special Steel, Nanjing Steel, CITIC Metal, Resources, etc. We believe that with our input in the scientific R&D and also connect with the AI, we are able to further enhance our level of the innovation. We are able to build a galaxy of innovative results. Thank you. Next question.
[Foreign language] My name is Wu Wei. I'm from the Hang Seng Investment Management. So my organization has been awarded as the. And so as we all know, that actually for the CITIC has been selected as the number one best return of stock in the global offshore Chinese funds. So my question is for Mr. Fang, that last year we could see that what is your measures that to stabilize the interest margin?
Thank you very much for your question. Actually, my colleague from the finance team and also the chairman also mentioned that actually the net interest margin of the CITIC Bank last year was 1.17%, outperforming other players. Actually, if we look at about the past three years, actually we already outperformed other players as well because in the recent three years, that net interest margin actually down by 28 basis points. So what does it mean? It means that actually we are able to made it additional the revenue of the CNY 22 billion. That means we have already made optimized our ROE by 1%. In such an environment of the low interest, that would be very important for us to stable the efficiency of the assets. That means for the same amount of the assets that we are able to have higher productivity and efficiency. Why is that?
There are two reasons. First of all, we have very clear target. We maintain the continuity of the stable net interest margin. And this is a very important principle that must be observed by the whole bank. Actually, five years ago, that we've already made a projection of the drop of the interest rate. And therefore, five years ago, we've already come up with a target that is to stabilize the interest margin. And over the five years, through further deepened our value management philosophy. And we really focus on the optimization of the customer structure and also to further optimize our asset- debt ratio that we enable to stable the net interest margin.
When I reviewed what we've done in the past five years on how to stabilize the net interest margin, I think from my personal experience that we have to make a very resolute decision and we have to work really hard because we need to control it very well. With a stable interest margin, that will be able to enable us to stabilize the ROE and even lower the ROE. That is a very important part of our management philosophy. In the beginning, we took some small steps. Gradually, we started to take strides, make strides, and move forward, increase strides. We have to manage the business relationships and manage the cost. Now we start from small steps, and now we are making great strides to move forward. I talked about the first reason.
The second reason is that our strategies were appropriate. So we focus on reducing liability and optimizing the structures. So we stabilized the NIM, net interest margin, through two methods. First of all, the liability cost rate was reduced greatly compared to the industry peers. And also the percentage of savings also increased because we have improved the capability development of the settling and the transactions on the bank side. And also for the corporate savings, accounting for 52%, grew by about 9 percentage points year on year. And also last year, in terms of personal savings, grew by about 3 percentage points. And also we are actually 4 percentage points better than the industry peers.
As to the market environment, there was the low interest rate in the market, but we take proactive measures to increase the long-term savings, especially the three-year fixed-term deposits was recorded as part of our asset allocation. So the three-year fixed-term deposit ratio, we can see that on average is lower a little bit, about 3.3% lower. But if we compare with three years ago, right now we are lower than the industry peers, banks such as 14 basis points. But three years ago, our cost was about 59 basis points higher. Last year, the gap was narrowed to 35 basis points.
So we narrowed by 24 basis points. Compared with large banks, the gap three years ago was 22 basis points, but now last year the gap was 14 basis points. So we narrowed the gap by 8 basis points. So in terms of assets, we are focused on the safety of assets.
We deal with the sunken risk. We will not pursue benefits at the cost of increased risk. The loan assets, we can see that the loan assets accounting for a high percentage of our total assets, and then the average yield was about 4.24%. The instrument discounting and the discounted rate was about 1.9%. Moving forward to in terms of the future for the net interest margin in 2025, the banking industry, not just us, and we will have to deal with the pressure, downward pressure for net interest margin because the overall environment features lower interest. The pressure for the net interest margin in the banking industry is higher. Now the macroeconomic situation, the Central Bank may put in place some quantitative easing monetary fund, and also it will also contribute to the lowering of interest.
And the downward trends of the NPL and also the other inference from the interest rate and also the government hidden liability exchange replacement policies also exert an impact on our industry as well. So in terms of the loan's downward trend, we see the trend and the pressure is quite big. In terms of liabilities, the Central Bank is strengthening the bank's net interest margin. And however, the liability cost lowering cannot offset the yield reduction. So in the recent years, in terms of stabilizing the net interest margin, we have already made a lot of efforts to put in place some management methods for pricing, and we also have mechanisms for managing the loans. These kind of systems can be quite helpful for us. So last year, so there was the cost of the savings gradually reduced.
Thirdly, we are going to put in place more measures to stabilize the net interest margin. We want to reduce the reduction for the net interest margin. We would like to do better than industry peers. In terms of the assets, we would like to expand the percentage of the loans and also shrink the low-yield deposits by about RMB 100 billion . We are going to make some adjustments in terms of the bond investment. We have some high-yield credit bonds, and then now that because of the changes in the interest rate, we have to adjust the bond structure for the liability, and we have to strengthen the development of transaction banking. We would like to increase the percentage of the non-fixed-term savings as well because the banking industry is just like a big family.
We have our own recipes for success, but now we are in a phase of downward interest rate. That is why we need to adopt measures to address this. The bank's non-fixed-term savings percentage will determine the cost of the savings in terms of assets and liabilities. We all have to make efforts. We should make efforts from both aspects so that we can stabilize the net interest margin. Next question.
Dear leaders, I'm from Bank of China (Hong Kong) Asset Management. My name is Wu Yihong. Right now, in the future, the financial industries may encounter some bottlenecks in terms of profitability. What are your sources of profitability in terms of the financial segments at CITIC?
Let me answer your question. Mr. Fang talked about the low interest rate environment. Traditional financial businesses are facing adjustments and restructuring pressure.
So during the process of transition, there are some new opportunities for growth as well. At the macroeconomic level, the national government is providing stronger supports to the industry chain, to the New Productive Forces, to the economic growth as well. CITIC has advantages in terms of full licensing, and we can cover the different phases of the company's financing needs. Moving forward, we are going to focus on five aspects to become more competitive financially. First of all, we need to have in-depth synergy and integration and give full play to our financial value. We already have some successful practices based on the characteristics of these tech companies and taking advantage of our licensing. And we launched a kind of service model featuring equity loans, insurance, and liability. We can cover 96% of the specialized and innovative companies.
We are going to strengthen our services in terms of banking, leasing, retirement, pension funds, and so on. We are going to focus on green Fintech, pension financial services, and we are going to convert our advantages into a moat to protect our business performance. So previous speaker already talked about the internationalization strategies. In terms of the financial sector, we are going to help Chinese companies to go global to offer cross-border financing and offshore financing services. We also have a slogan that says, "If you want to go global, CITIC is the go-to company. If you would like to come to China, CITIC is also the go-to company." So this is our dual-brand strategy. So we're going to strengthen our asset allocation capabilities. We have different kinds of growth strategies such as the National Nine Articles and the M&A Six Articles.
We're going to give full play to our own strength, and we have our own operational capabilities. We're going to seize the opportunities in the market, and we are going to improve the wealth management capabilities, and we will focus on some retail customers as well. We provide asset management products and services. Taking advantage of our full licenses, we can provide one-stop financial services to our customers and also offer bespoke asset management products as well. We are going to focus on some key accounts and manage the risk and reduce the cost for risk as well, utilizing AI technologies to empower more precise marketing, achieve more intelligent risk management and mitigation.
This year, we initiated a core project at CITIC, utilizing our financial strength and advantages and improve our core competitiveness so that we can achieve comprehensive and holistic financial service, high-quality development, and payback to our shareholders. Thank you. Next question.
Thank you for the opportunity from China Construction Bank (Jianyin International). My question is about the risk in the real estate sector. Just now, previous speakers talked about some measures to mitigate and resolve risks. Last year, you also got some good results in terms of risk mitigation. Right now, I would like to ask that in terms of the real estate finance and the local government liability, what is the risk level? In terms of the provision coverage ratio, starting from 2023, it was about CNY 8 billion last year, reduced to about CNY 6 billion to CNY 7 billion in last year.
Whether the release of the risk has already come to an end.
Let me answer this question. Thank you for your question. CITIC, during the process of business expansion, like the executives mentioned, we have been giving top priority to risk prevention and resolution and mitigation. Through our relentless efforts in recent years, we have managed to reduce the risk, financial risk, and stabilize the quality of the assets. In terms of real estate, CITIC Group has been implementing the policies of the government to achieve sound development in the real estate sector. We are going to expand the whitelisting project. Secondly, we are going to focus on preventing risk in some key areas and contribute to industry synergy and mitigate the risk and promote the sound development of the real estate sector. The industry concentrations dropped by 0.7 percentage points compared with earlier this year.
NPL ratio dropped by about 0.48 percentage points by 2024, by the end of 2024, for the real estate enterprises' asset-liability ratio , and also compared with the more concentrated risk in 2024, reduced by 38%. In terms of the local government liability and debt in 2024, we put in place some measures to resolve the local debt risk. We have a CNY 12 trillion combination policy, and our business is mainly focused on concentrated in Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Shandong provinces, and also reduced by 16%, quite noticeably. NPL non-performing assets concentrated in Guizhou and Inner Mongolia. Next step, that our company will continue to stabilize the real estate market and principle, and so to proactively focus on the white list project, and also to take the opportunity to resolve those local debts and to manage the assets to continue to lower the risks.
And we are looking for the new opportunities among the risk resolution as well. So in the interest of time, last question.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm from Founder Securities. My question is about the asset quality. As we all know, that actually for China CITIC Bank, not only focus on the growth, but also focus on the asset quality. And so you have improved a lot in NPL ratio. So there is still a lot of pressure in terms of the macro environment. So how do you see the asset quality last year, and how do you see the changes in this year?
Thank you very much for your attention. And first of all, I will share with you about the asset quality in 2024. In summary, that our asset quality that maintained stable, outperformed the market. There are three indicators.
The first one that is when we look at about the non-performing loan ratio, that the NPL ratio continues to drop for six years. And last year, that number was 1.16%. So there was a 0.02% drop. So that's the best in the previous four years. But here we also, when we could see that when we look at about the individual loans, and there was 0.1% in growth. And for credit cards, that the NPL was 0.251% with a drop of 0.03%. And another one that is the non-performing debts, we could see that number was 1.84%. And for those the institutional, that actually institutional NPL ratio drops for six years. And for individuals, so here we could see that there are some fluctuations. However, when we look at about the credit cards NPL, that actually the non-performing credit cards loans actually is quite stable.
And so when we see last fourth quarter has less than CNY 1.8 billion. That's less of CNY 180 million of the non-performing credit loans. And the second question is about the outlook for 2025. So we will see the pressure will come in from retail because that the individual's income and also some of the loans by small and medium-sized enterprises, their cash flow are not very stable. But of course, in terms of the consumption promotion campaign that actually launched by various levels of the government, we believe that by the second half year of 2025, that we will have a very positive outlook in terms of retail. And we believe that the risks of the retail will be lower than last year.
In terms of real estate, so here we could see we can already foresee there is continued strengthening and promotion policy of the local government to promote the development of the real estate, and so we could see for the first-tier city, those sales margins are turning around. However, for the third and fourth-tier cities, are still in the downward pressure, and so we could feel that for some particular enterprises, we will still have a high pressure in terms of their cash flow. And then when we look at about the financing, and we think that's quite positive because that the central government has launched a policy, and therefore that will help many local governments to pay back their debts, and of course, we also need to consider the risks of exit the platform.
And there will be some new risks when some institutions that actually withdraw from some key platforms. And so we need to consider the risks of that part. And so in terms of the asset quality, we believe that we are currently clear about our foundation and the base part of our asset quality. And so we will continue to optimize the asset structure. And especially, we could see that the favorable policies that are published by the government, we could ensure that in 2025, our asset quality will still outperform the market. And that's the end of today's full-year results briefing. Thank you.