President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon. How are things going? What results can you report?
CEO and Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank German Gref: Thank you, everything is fine. Last year was a good one for us. We have published our performance results under international financial reporting standards, and now we will use them to assess our results and pay dividends.
Last year, we increased our net profit to a record 1.706 trillion rubles. Consequently, we will pay out 50 percent of that amount in dividends, which will amount to 853 billion rubles, which is also a record sum.
We managed to keep the main parameters within the planned figures. We have a three-year strategy approved by the Board of Directors. We have completed the second year of our strategy by achieving almost all the objectives we had set.
Vladimir Putin: Good, congratulations.
German Gref: Cost-to-income ratio stood at 30 percent, one of the best in the global market. It is a very good figure for such banks as ours. Only three banks in the world can boast such CIR figures.
Last year, in order to maintain strong performance, we worked hard to optimise our expenses, introducing many new processes, using AI to streamline operations, and applying a multi-agent system, which is being used now to implement a number of regular transactions. As a result, our labour efficiency last year increased significantly: usually, the increase is about 6–7 percent but last year it was around 10 percent.
We cannot be certain until the end of the year that we will keep within the planned parameters, which will be a challenge, but we plan or at least hope that this year we will be able to report a larger income than the year before in order to achieve the strategic benchmarks set for us. So far, we are sticking to our strategic priorities. We did our best to achieve all our targets these past years, even though there were several critical moments.
So, the overall situation is normal. We continue to develop, and I hope that we will fulfil all the tasks set before us.
Vladimir Putin: Good, congratulations. The result is good indeed. Thank you.
German Gref: Thank you.
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