May 15 (SeeNews) - ProCredit Holding said on Tuesday that the after-tax profit of its development-oriented commercial banks operating in Southeast Europe (SEE) edged down to 12.8 million euro ($15.2 million) in the first quarter of 2018 from 13.2 million euro in the prior-year period.
Southeast Europe is the Frankfurt-listed banking group's largest segment and comprises seven banks, accounting for 70% of the group’s loan portfolio.
The net interest income after allowances of ProCredit Holding's banks in SEE totalled 29.9 million euro in January-March, which compares to 33.2 million euro in the like period of 2017, ProCredit Holding said in an interim financial statement.
"Strong growth was recorded for our banks in Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria in particular, and it is noteworthy in this context that approximately 1/3 of the growth in Bulgaria comes from our branch in Thessaloniki, a development which we highly welcome," Borislav Kostadinov, member of the management board of ProCredit General Partner, the managing entity of ProCredit Holding, told SeeNews in an e-mailed statement on Tuesday.
"We were happy to see that in the first quarter of 2018 our customer loan portfolio for the South Eastern Europe segment increased by an impressive 66 million euro to 2.8 billion euro [ ...] At the same time, I’m glad that the proportion of credit-impaired loans has decreased," Borislav Kostadinov added.
The net fee and commission income of ProCredit Holding's SEE banks rose to 8.0 million euro in the first three months of 2018 from 7.4 million euro the year before.
ProCredit Holding's SEE banks cut their operating expenses to 25.0 million euro in the first quarter from 25.8 million euro a year earlier.
Customer deposits totalled 2.46 billion euro at the end of March, 57.8 million euro less compared to the end of 2017, while customer loans increased by 65.7 million euro year-on-year to 2.82 billion euro at the end of March.
The share of credit-impaired loans of ProCredit Holding's SEE banks decreased to 4.2% at the end of March, down 0.3 percentage points compared to the end of 2017.
($ = 0.8392 euro)