Agricultural sector has reached balance, rate of lending there to be moderate - Sberbank deputy head

MOSCOW. Sept 8 (Interfax) - The agricultural sector has reached somewhat of a balance, and the pace of lending there will be moderate, Sberbank Deputy Chairman of the Board Anatoly Popov said in a statement.

"It is difficult to provide a forecast right now. It seems that the industry has reached a certain balance. In the main areas, domestic demand is covered by domestic production. Some substantial growth is unlikely to take place. The growth rate will be moderate, at a more or less stable level," Popov said, answering a question regarding how much money Sberbank plans to allocate for lending to the agricultural sector in 2023.

Sberbank in H1 2023 increased its portfolio of agribusiness loans by 4% to 1.9 trillion rubles. "Soft loans grew by 2.5% and amounted to 900 billion rubles. That is, if we take the portfolio, 900 billion rubles are soft loans, and one trillion are loans without preferential terms," Popov told Interfax in an interview.

In the agricultural sector funding for the fishing industry is set to develop actively. "There is a big theme going forward, if we include the fishing industry in the agricultural sector. We're talking about crab auctions in the first days of October. We see great interest from potential participants. The total amount of lots put up may exceed 300 billion rubles. If agriculture is to see moderate growth, here we should see serious movement," the deputy chairman said.

The main difficulties in this sphere at the moment are associated not with availability of crabs, the ability to catch them or the lack of markets, but with the possibility of building ships at Russian shipyards.

"This expertise is just being formed, and it will take some time before Russian shipyards learn to build on time, on schedule, within that budget. Plus, some of the equipment is imported anyway, and when designing the fleet it was assumed that this equipment would be purchased from unfriendly countries. Now Russian shipyards have to actively reorient themselves towards friendly countries, which takes some time. That is, the main challenge is not crabs, their harvesting, sales, prices, markets, but the main problem is exclusively in shipbuilding. Many fishermen have actually become shipbuilders and are actively entering this market, we have already seen several such examples in the market," the deputy chairman said.

Potential participants of crab auctions have already applied to Sberbank for financing, he said. "The auctions are planned for the first half of October, so there is not much time left. Potential auction participants are applying to banks for financing. This is normal," Popov said.