Lion Finance Group PLC (BDGSF) Q3 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Lion Finance Group PLC's third quarter results call. My name is Ninia Arshakouni. I'm Head of Investor Relations and I'll be the moderator for today's call. I am joined on this call by Archil Gaciciladze, our Group CEO. Hovhannes Toroian, who is the chief financial officer of Ameriabank, our banking subsidiary in Armenia, and Akakili Kokeli, our group economist, who will be covering the macro. We're pleased to report another set of solid results for the quarter with very strong customer franchise growth across our business operations in Georgia and Armenia. Our loan book grew 22% in constant currency with even stronger growth in the Armenian operations. Overall, our profit for the quarter amounted to 547 million Georgian lari, an 8% increase versus the prior year. Return on average equity stood at a solid 28%. Cost to income was 35.3% and improvement versus the prior quarter. And our cost of credit risk ratio was 0.5%. And we maintained robust asset quality across the whole business. Before we dive into the details of these results, we'll first start with the macroeconomic developments and Akake will kick off and then we'll hear from Archil and Joannès and in the end we'll open the floor for questions. Akake, now you can start the macro part and let's move on. Thank you, Nini. Hello, everyone. I will be presenting the macroeconomic update for our core markets, Georgia and Armenia. Let's start with growth performance. In the first nine months of the year, both economies delivered solid growth numbers supported by robust domestic demand and resilient external sector inflows. Accordingly, we have maintained our full year real GDP growth forecast for 2025 at 7.5% for Georgia and 5% for Armenia. That said, the uncertainty around the baseline re...