China's Citic Securities Sees Profit Drop in H1 2017 as Turnover Remains Weak

China’s leading brokerage Citic Securities saw its first-half net profit slump 6 percent year-on-year due to weak stock market volumes that bit into brokerage incomes.

For the six months ending June 30, the bottom line dropped to 4.9 billion yuan ($735 million), down from 5.4 billion yuan a year earlier, China's largest brokerage by assets said in a report to the Shanghai Stock Exchange .

However, Citic Securities still tops the 129 mainland brokerage houses and the figures were also right in line with its preliminary financial data for H1 2017, provided by the company at an earnings briefing last month.

Earnings of Chinese brokerages have fallen off a cliff for two years because trading turnover has shrunk sharply since the boom seen in 2015. Trading volumes both in Hong Kong and the mainland have since continued at low levels.

According to the Securities Association of China, the nation’s brokerage firms saw their profits dropping more than 11 percent in the six months through June 2017. The 129 registered providers have made a total profit of 55.3 billion yuan, with 117 firms profitable in the first half of the year.

Citic Securities made a net profit of 10.4 million yuan in 2016, its lowest annual profit in three years and also down 47 percent from 2015.