Gref predicted 2021 to be no worse than this year

Sberbank President German Gref said in an interview with Kommersant that he does not expect 2021 to be worse than the current one. This year, the bank decided to pay shareholders a record dividend for 2019.

• Gref noted that "there is no second bank in the world, no second company in general, which in a period of such turbulence would allow itself dividends of 423 billion rubles." “So far, nothing suggests that 2021 will be worse than 2020,” Gref answered a question about dividends for 2020. He has already said that he expects Sberbank dividends to remain at 50% of net profit.

• At the end of September, about 9,500 employees had been ill with the coronavirus in the company, he said. “We reacted quite quickly and transferred people to a remote location. We managed to make a quick transition thanks to the well-coordinated and almost round-the-clock work of our blocks - HR and services. However, the bulk of the employees, more than 130-140 thousand people, continued to work offline,” Gref emphasized.

• During the crisis, about 550 thousand citizens applied for restructuring and credit holidays to Sberbank. About 40% of applications were satisfied.

• According to the programs of state support for business - loans at 2%, salaries at 0% and "Systemic" - applications worth more than 350 billion rubles were approved. The most effective of them, according to Gref, lending at 2%.

• The head of the bank stated that the process of building the Sberbank ecosystem has not yet been completed. In total, about $2 billion was invested in it, "less than 3% of our capital."

• Now the ecosystem includes about 50 companies, of which about three dozen are key, and some are already profitable. In 2019, non-financial digital companies earned more than 35 billion rubles in revenue, and in 2020 the company wants to earn more than 70 billion rubles in part of the share of Sberbank.