BEIJING, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), the country's last major state-owned commercial bank still to list on the stock market, said its operating profits rose 64.6 percent to 42.3 billion yuan (5.6 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of this year.

    The intermediary services recorded a rapid growth to hit 8.7 billion yuan (1.1 billion U.S. dollars), up 52.6 percent over the same period last year, according to a notice published on its website.

    Its income generated from intermediary services accounted for 10.82 percent of the bank's total, up 0.7 percentage point.

    The non-performing loan ratio of the bank dropped by 2.09 percentage points in the first six months, while the ratio was recorded at 23.43 percent of the loan portfolio at the end of 2006.

    A high bad loan ratio is a major obstacle to ABC's ambitions to list on the stock market.

    The other three banks, the Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Construction Bank of China, had all completed their reforms and gone public by October last year.

    The government is auditing the bank's financial record to provide an important reference point for determining how much capital would be injected into the bank, a banking watchdog official said earlier.

    Its deposits increased by 154.8 billion yuan (20.4 billion U.S. dollars)in the same period to reach 2.9 trillion yuan (381.6 billion U.S. dollars), a decrease of 72.4 billion yuan compared with the same period last year, the bank said.