OTP sets aside 100m euros for acquisitions

OTP, Hungary’s largest banking group, has set aside some 100 million euros for new acquisitions in Romania. Their first target is participation in the CEC privatisation, although this amount will not be enough to cover taking over a bank with assets of nearly 1.4bn euros, as in the case of CEC. Competition is high in the CEC privatisation race. Laszlo Wolf, OTP’s vice-president, says the group could take out loans of up to one billion euros to fund new acquisitions. He added that OTP needed to grow strongly for several years if it wanted to move on to consolidation. Mid last year OTP paid some 47.5 million dollars to buy RoBank, a credit institution with a market share of only 1%. Despite its small size, this enabled OTP to get an operating licence and establish a foothold. Although this market is thought to have the highest growth potential in the region, OTP has allocated the smallest amount of its new regional expansion projects to Romania. ZF