November 2 (SeeNews) - The Romanian Development Bank, BRD, majority-owned by French banking group Societe Generale, on Monday reported a 19% annual fall in its nine-month net profit to 660 million lei, or 156 million euro ($230.4 million).
The year-on-year drop in net profit through September as reported by BRD was calculated based on a year-ago figure that discounted earnings from the sale of the bank’s 25% stake in Romanian insurer Asiban in August last year.
"Banking operations continued to suffer the effects of the crisis in the third quarter. On the one hand, it’s because of the lower demand for banking products and services, especially in the retail segment, and on the other hand, because of the continuous rise of non-performing loans," the BRD President, Patrick Gelin, said in a statement.
BRD said it used the average exchange rate for January-September of Romania's central bank, which was 4.2278 lei per euro, to calculate its net profit in euro.
BRD's end-September credit portfolio was 8.0% higher on the year at 33 billion lei. Deposits with the bank reached 30.2 billion lei, up by 1.0% from end-September last year.
Return on equity was 21.6% and the cost/income ratio was 42.1% through September. The bank’s net income increased by 18% on the year to 2.53 billion lei in the first nine months.
BRD's assets fell to 47.9 billion lei at the end of September, from 49.5 billion lei at the end of June this year. The bank had 2.6 million customers at the end of September.
"As these quarterly results fit relatively well into our full year 2009 IFRS [International Financial Reporting Standards] estimates, we keep our Hold recommendation for BRD shares and the 12-month target price of 13.4 lei," Raiffeisen Capital Investment said in a note to investors.
BRD is a component of the 10-share blue-chip BET index of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, BVB. Its shares were trading at 12.4 lei by 1055 GMT on Monday, unchanged from Friday's close.
Romania's BRD issued the following financial figures in a statement to the BVB (in lei). The net profit figure for the nine months to September 2008 includes earnings from the Asiban sale:
|
9-mo 2009 |
9-mo 2008 |
Net profit/loss |
660,210,830 |
1,039,150,491 |
Pre-tax profit/loss |
792,191,805 |
1,246,791,432 |
Interest income |
3,173,086,995 |
2,610,008,613 |
Income from commissions and fees |
832,698,328 |
783,606,376 |
Other income |
N/A |
N/A |
Total assets |
47,850,814,576 |
44,542,966,354 |
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