Raiffeisen Bk Intl Ag Ord (RAIFF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the preliminary results 2024 conference call of Reifeisen Bank International. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Johann Strobl, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our full year 2024 results call. I hope that you have had a good start to the year and I thank you for joining us today. Let me begin with a few overview slides before we dig into the quarterly trends. We start with slide 4 where we can report group consolidated profits of 1 billion 157 million and a 9.4% return on equity excluding the OCI recycling in Belarus. This is, of course, a substantial drop in consolidated profit year on year and it includes two major effects in the fourth quarter. The first is the provision in Russia related to the recent court decision what we have from the Rasperia case. The second effect is the sale of Belarus with a PLN impact of minus 824 million. I will discuss both of these in just a moment. Focusing on the core group, which excludes Russia and Belarus, we can report consolidated profits of 975 million, broadly stable year on year. Like last year, this core profitability is significantly impacted by further litigation provisions in Poland. On the bright side, we see the one of the group excluding Russia comes at 15%, slightly above our guidance. Moving to slide 5. and focusing on the core of the group, loans to customers increased 3% in 2024. Net interest income was roughly flat at €4,155,000,000 and fee income improved 5% to €1,804,000,000. OPEX finished in line with our guidance of around €3.3 billion for a cost-income ratio of 52.5%. On slide 6, and spending an extra minute on the cor...