Hungary’s largest bank, the OTP Group, posted its biggest-ever annual net profit of 412.58 billion forints (€1.22 billion) last year, up 30 percent from 2018, the bank said in its quarterly earnings report published on the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE) website.
In the report signed by Chairman-CEO Sándor Csányi, the bank said the main reason for the large jump in profits was mainly due to last year’s aggressive expansion, with OTP having had acquired banks in the six countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
Even so, only five of the six acquisitions’ results have been consolidated in the group’s annual profit, meaning that the profits of the Slovenian subsidiary will only appear after the first quarter of this year.
In the report, OTP also said that this year the management will focus on a tighter integration of its recent acquisitions into the overall structure of the bank, but was also “examining the possibilities of further value-driven acquisitions.”
Besides its home market, the Hungarian OTP Group currently operates in 11 countries of the region via its subsidiaries in Albania, Bulgaria (DSK Bank), Croatia (OTP Banka Hrvatska), Moldova, Montenegro (Crnogorska Komercijalna Banka), Romania (OTP Bank Romania), Russia (OAO OTP Bank), Serbia (OTP Banka Srbija), Slovakia (OTP Banka Slovensko), Slovenia (SKB Banka) and the Ukraine (OTP Bank JSC).
At the time of writing, OTP shares traded at 13,700 forints on the BSE, down 4.2 percent, while the exchange’s BUX index stood at 41,347, down 3.03 percent, roughly in line with the fall of other major stock markets.
Title image: OTP Bank
