Erste Group net profit up 24.4% yoy to EUR 1.23 billion on growing revenues

"We are pleased that our strong operating performance and net profit in the first nine months of this year were driven by several healthy developments: all our home markets have been enjoying robust economic growth; we have been performing very well in Retail and SME business, increasing overall loans (+6.3% year to date) and deposits (+5.9% year to date); and we have also increased our digital advantage and improved customers' experience thanks to George, our pan-European digital platform that is now being used by over 3 million customers in four markets. 

As the countries in CEE region are mostly riding a really good economic wave right now, our NPL ratio continued to decline to 3.5%. The NPL coverage remains high at 70.7%. On the other hand, we are experiencing incredibly low risk costs, which we should treat as a gift that will not be here forever. This makes the trend reversal that we have achieved in the operating result, driven by sustained growth in our core revenues – net interest and net fee and commission income were up 4.4% and 5.1%, respectively – all the more important. Equally significant for our future is the strong level of our capitalization: taking into account the net profit for third quarter and the positive impact of about 30 basis points resulting from the approval of a new operational risk model, our CET 1 ratio (Basel 3 fully loaded, pro forma) stands at 13.2%.

Based on this solid set of results, we are improving our outlook for the full year 2018 and target a return on tangible equity above 12%," said Andreas Treichl, CEO of Erste Group Bank AG.