“The last three months were a hard period. Perhaps March, April and May were among the most difficult ones,” Sberbank CEO Herman Gref said at a videoconference with Vladimir Putin, presidential web page reports. “We have decreased the net income by 25% and formed about thrice as many reserves as last year. During the crisis, only 25% of the terminals were in service and the current share is 90%,” Gref said.
According to the Sberbank CEO, “We expected a preliminary slowdown in GDP of about 6–7% this year; however, today our expectations are slightly higher than the Central Bank and the government’s forecasts. Our estimate is a slowdown of about 4.2–4.5% by the end of the year. We expect the Russian economy to do better than the European and American economies.”