August 1 (SeeNews) - The first-half net profit of Romania's BRD bank [BSE:BRD] soared 58% to 62 million lei ($18.6 million/14 million euro), positively influenced by an improved cost-to-income ratio, it said on Thursday.
The bank managed to reduce its operating costs by 8.9% on the year and the cost/income ratio improved by an annual 1.9 percentage points to 45% in the first half of the year, BRD, majority-owned French financial services group Societe Generale, said in a statement.
The lender's net risk costs decreased by an annual 7.8% in the first half.
BRD's net banking income totalled 1.36 billion lei in the first half, down 5.0% on the year mainly due to a lower net interest margin.
The loan portfolio edged down by a yearly 1.0% to 34.85 billion lei at the end of June, while deposits grew by 0.9% from a year earlier to 33.26 billion lei. As a result, the loan/deposit ratio improved to 91.4%, falling 6.2 percentage points from June 2012.
"We view these results as positive considering them as an evolution in the right direction but we do not expect a strong market reaction since after BCR’s huge release of deferred tax liabilities there were hopes that BRD-GSG would undertake a similar action" Raiffeisen Capital & Investment Research said in a note to investors.
Details follow (in millions of lei):
|
H1 2013 |
H1 2012 |
Net profit |
62.2 |
39.4 |
Gross profit |
89.0 |
46.2 |
Operating profit |
1,360 |
1,433 |
Net commission income |
366.4 |
376.5 |
Net interest income |
851.7 |
932.9 |
Total assets |
44,966 |
47,924 |
The bank had 886 units in Romania at end-June, down from 915 at end-2012.
The results are reported under international financial accounting standards.
Blue chip BRD was trading up 0.64% at 7.90 lei by 0907 CET on the Bucharest bourse on Thursday.
(1 euro = 4.4163 Romanian lei)