05 April 2013, 18:19 / Finance

Sberbank earned almost 100 billion rubles in the first quarter.

However, lending did not recover during this time Tatyana Voronova M. Stulov / Vedomosti

At the end of the first quarter of 2013, the volume of Sberbank’s corporate loan portfolio decreased by 1.5%, as follows from its quarterly reports. In March, the volume of loan repayments approached the highest monthly value in the last three years, the bank said in its comments.

Thanks to good core income, the cost-to-profit ratio remained under control (40%), Alfa Bank analysts indicate , despite the fact that Sberbank's operating expenses increased by a third compared to last month.

“We are disappointed by the lack of quality demand from large companies - its recovery is too slow to switch to working with another segment,” says a source close to the bank.

True, the slowdown in lending has not yet affected the bank’s profitability - in March it earned 32 billion rubles. The profit could have been higher if not for contributions to reserves and tax payments. The bank allocated more than 25 billion rubles to reserves. and paid almost the same amount (24 billion rubles) in taxes; last year, expenses for this were half as much.

To calculate the amount of advance tax payments in the first quarter, the base of the third quarter of the previous year is used, and in 2012 it was significantly higher than in 2011. As for reserves, the main increase occurred in the item “unused credit lines, guarantees and sureties, etc. ", and can later be partially restored. In the second quarter, the bank will make up for all this, Vedomosti’s interlocutor promises.

In the first quarter, the bank earned 29.7% more, while the volume of expenses decreased by 39.7% compared to last year’s first quarter, despite substantial contributions to reserves, VTB Capital experts indicate. According to their calculations, the margin level for January-March decreased to 6.1% at the end of the quarter.

The decline in the portfolio was obvious, especially since expectations had already been voiced by management, VTB Capital analysts write. In March, Sberbank reduced rates for high-quality large borrowers by 1 percentage point, but this has not yet had an impact on the indicators, they believe.

In March, the volume of deposits increased by 141 billion rubles, or 2.1%, both due to deposits and savings certificates, but company funds decreased by 6.5% due to balances on current accounts. The decline may be due to an isolated incident, they say.