More than half of South African consumers in good standing

By Li Jianmin

JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 26 (Chinese media) -- More than half of South African consumers are considered to be in good standing in terms of credit, South Africa's National Credit Regulator (NCR) said on Wednesday.

"Out of 17.17 million consumers, 10.38 million consumers were in good standing, while 6.79 million consumers had impaired records," it said. The regulator said this emerged from findings for the quarter ended June 2008.

Consumers were considered to be "in good standing" if none of their accounts were more than two months in arrears. Those had impaired records when at least one of their accounts was more than two months in arrears, or if they had judgments or other negative information on their credit records, the NCR said.

This implied that 60.4 percent of all consumers have good credit records. This was slightly down from 61.6 percent of consumers that had good records in the March 2008 quarter.

There was therefore a 1.2 percent increase in the percentage of consumers with impaired records since the last quarter, with a cumulative increase of 3.2 percent since June 2007.

In the quarter to June 2008, 110.24 million enquiries were made against consumer credit records, compared to 108.88 million enquiries for the March 2008 quarter.

About 39.4 percent of all enquiries for credit bureau reports during the June 2008 quarter were made by banks, 25.7 percent by retailers and 34.9 percent by all other categories together.

Enquiries by banks declined by 18 percent since the last quarter, while enquiries by retailers increased by 14 percent.

A total of 41,057 credit bureau reports were issued to consumers during this quarter, while more than 120,000 consumers reviewed their reports over the last nine months.

Debt levels were not excessive, but the present global and domestic economic environment suggested that "past interest rate hikes would result in a further deterioration in terms of consumer and business stress before the situation improves", Econometrix said in a comment on the NCR's latest figures.