The Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) has announced that it is intensively thinking about its withdrawal from certain markets in east and central Europe amidst fears of a potential spill-over of the eurozone crisis to that part of the continent.
It is quite possible that in the future we will pull out from some of those countries, the bank's Chief Executive Officer, Herbert Stepic, was quoted by the French AFP news agency as saying.
This Austrian bank group has nearly 14 million customers in 18 countries in eastern and central Europe.
Our business model is sustainable, we are present on the right markets and we can compensate for the poor results in countries such as Hungary in other countries, Stepic said.
RBI is a fully-consolidated subsidiary of Raiffeisen Zentralbank Austria AG (RZB).
The RBI CEO said that the Raiffeisen Zentralbank would have to collect EUR 2.5 billion euros as additional capital to meet the stricter capital requirements of the European regulators.
The bank is already considering possibilities for accomplishing that goal.
The RBI reported that its consolidated net profit declined by 62 percent in the third quarter of 2011 in comparison to Q2 2011. The net consolidated profit fell to EUR 130 million, due to losses in the RBI branch in Hungary.
The amount of non-performing loans increased to EUR 122 million euros in Q3 2011. The biggest increase in non-performing loans was registered in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia. On the other hand, bad loans kept going down in Austria and Russia.
The bank expects a profit in 2011.
