BRD makes 187m-euro profit despite recession

BRD-SocGen made 792 million RON (187 million euros) in net profit last year, down 41% against the record-high profit of 2008, in part because of the sale of its Asiban stake. This is probably the highest net profit made in 2009 on the banking market according to Romanian accounting standards, despite the over 7% economic decline. The bank was barely able to preserve the same volume of lending as in 2008, ending the year with 2% growth in nominal terms, to 34.8 billion RON (8.3 billion euros), with 52% being loans to companies. Almost 6% of overall loans had to be restructured to enable debtors to continue to repay their loans, with restructured loans accounting for 10.5% of corporate loans, i.e. 1.9 billion RON. Non-performing loans rose to 10.5% of the total, compared with a market average of 15.4%. Amid a rise in the number of bankruptcies in the economy, the number of corporate clients fell by 13,000, while the number of retail clients fell by 51,000.

“Considering the extremely unfavourable economic context, our result was more than satisfactory, and it shows the bank’s strength and soundness despite the significant decline of loans and the degradation of asset quality,” said Guy Poupet, president of BRD-SocGen.