MOSCOW, August 5 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s largest lender, Sberbank, expects to net $900 million in profit from international operations this year, CEO German Gref said Monday.
"In the first half of this year, we already earned 14.5 billion rubles ($440 million) on international markets, and by the end of the year, we hope that we will have earned about $900 million in profits from abroad," Gref said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin's website.
Sberbank recently stepped up its presence on international markets, buying Volksbank International, an Eastern European subsidiary of Austria's Oesterreichische Volksbanken-AG banking group, and Turkish Denizbank in a move to “build a truly global financial corporation.”
Sberbank earned a record 346.2 billion rubles ($10.5 billion) in net profit last year and expects a net profit of at least 370 billion rubles ($11.3 billion) this year.
