MOSCOW, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Russian bank VTB reported a record 2023 profit of 432.2 billion roubles ($4.68 billion) on Tuesday, rebounding from a revised, sanctions-induced loss of 667.5 billion the year before.
Chief Financial Officer Dmitry Pyanov told reporters that the state-owned lender was eyeing another record year in 2024, hoping to earn 435 billion roubles.
Last year, Russian banks collectively made record profits of 3.3 trillion roubles, driven by sharp rises in mortgage, consumer and corporate lending even as the central bank jacked up interest rates to their current level of 16%.
CEO Andrei Kostin blamed the bank's 2022 losses on sanctions, acknowledging the blow to Russia's financial sector wrought by sweeping Western restrictions, including depriving many banks of access to the international SWIFT payments system.
This year, Pyanov said, VTB would rely on "one-time effects" in a deteriorating macro environment, including bringing in 100 billion roubles in net profit through efforts to unblock assets frozen in the West.
Without one-time effects, VTB's net profit in 2024 would amount to 275 billion roubles, he said.
"This is VTB Group's organic net profit in conditions when interest rate risk alone took away around 100 billion roubles from us in 2023," Pyanov said. "We are, of course, magicians, but going forward our magic doesn't work."
($1 = 92.3810 roubles)
Reporting by Elena Fabrichnaya; writing by Alexander Marrow; editing by Sonali Paul and Jason Neely
Source: Reuters