Page 57 - RusRPTApr19

8.1 Bank sector overview
CBR governor Elvira Nabiullina said that the banking system has enough profit and capital to finance the economy. Retail crediting grows by 1.3%, corporate crediting by 0.8%. The central bank hopes that mortgage rates will stabilize and monitors the situation. Nabiullina said that in 2018, mortgage lending soared by almost 50% to about 3mn loans and interest rates were low “but of course, they went up a bit over the last month.”
8.1.1 Earnings
The CBR has published its FY18 banking sector statistics. Assets grew 10.4% y/y, supported by a 13.9% expansion of the loan portfolio. Profit increased 70% y/y to RUB 1.3 trillion ($19.8bn), with an implied ROE of 15% vs. 9% in 2017, VTB Capital (VTBC) analyst Svetlana Aslanova said in a note.
“Excluding the effect from banks under sanitisation, profit reached RUB1.9 trillion ($29bn). Sberbank earnings accounted for 60% of sector earnings, down from 83% in 2017,” Aslanova said in a note.
Russia’s banking sector is back in profit and earned RUB264bn ($4bn) in January, according to Central Bank of Russia (CBR) data released on February 28.
57 RUSSIA Country Report April 2019 www.intellinews.com