Russian state bank beating forecasts – chairman

Russia’s largest lender, Sber, has posted record earnings for January-August this year, the bank’s CEO, German Gref, told reporters at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok on Monday.

Gref announced that the lender had earned 999 billion rubles ($10.5 billion) in the first eight months of the year, with a return on capital above 25%. He also noted that the over-the-top results “mean that we are on track to finish the year better than our previous forecasts in terms of the return on equity.”

The bank’s current return on equity (ROE) – a measure of financial performance calculated by dividing net income by shareholders’ equity – is forecast at 22%.

The CEO also revealed that Sber’s loan portfolio had grown by nearly 18% since the beginning of the year.

“In August, despite the vacation season, client activity remained at a very high level – we issued almost 3 trillion rubles ($31.4 billion) in loans within one month … We hiked deposit rates with the maximum rising to 12%. As a result, our clients’ funds grew by almost 2% in August alone,” he concluded.

Sber greatly profited from the June sale of its subsidiary in Austria, which finalized its withdrawal from the EU banking market and brought the lender’s net profit in June alone to $1.5 billion, a record high for the year.

Sber has not been disclosing its earnings dynamics in comparison to 2022, when its profits slumped by almost 80% amid Ukraine-related Western sanctions. However, according to the lender’s recently published financial report for the first half of 2023, its earnings were 22.4% higher in January-June than in the first six months of 2021, its record year.

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