VTB24 Bank boosts RAS earnings 50% to 31.5 bln rubles in 2014
MOSCOW. Jan 22 (Interfax) - VTB24 , Russia's second biggest retail bank, boosted net profit to Russian Accounting Standards (RAS) before events following the reporting date 50% last year to 31.5 billion rubles, the bank said in a presentation.
The loan portfolio grew a quarter to more than 1.7 trillion rubles.
Loans to private individuals rose by 316 billion rubles to 1.58 trillion rubles. The main driver of growth was mortgage loans, which rose by 50% to 712 billion rubles. The credit card portfolio grew by 24% to 93 billion rubles. Cash loans rose by 13% to 656 billion rubles.
Fixed-term deposits of private individuals grew by 15% last year to about 1.27 trillion rubles. As a result, the share of the bank on the market of private deposits rose 1.1 percentage points to 9%.
Amid the devaluation of the ruble, the share of forex deposits rose to 46% from 33% at the start of last year.
VTB 24 President and CEO Mikhail Zadornov said at a press conference on Thursday that December was a record month for VTB 24's net profit, which was 8.5 billion rubles. He said the bank had over 1 billion rubles in conversion operations, which was several times higher than usual due to the ruble's depreciation. In addition, VTB 24 was able to cut interest expenditures on retail deposits by 2 billion rubles thanks to the early termination of agreements by clients who wanted to move to deposits with better interest.
"I think that IFRS financial results will be at a minimum no worse than in 2013," Zadornov said.
He added that the amount of forex loans in VTB 24's portfolio is currently less than 100 billion rubles, or about 3% of the bank's balance.
