Good afternoon, distinguished investors and analysts. Today we are summing up Sber Group's results for 2025.

You saw that our net profit grew by 8% this year, and the return on equity exceeded 22%. It exceeded the target level.

We hit our key operational and financial targets. All in all, we are happy with the results we got last year.

The external conditions, the bigger landscape, may have been rather intense and unfavorable amid very high rates and external restrictions. We had a very significant slowdown in economic growth, almost five times, from 4.9% in 2024 to 1% in 2025.

The share of industries that were affected by the slowdown grew significantly last year. Among the affected industries were mining, trade, and, all in all, roughly 46% of industries demonstrated negative dynamics.

Positive momentum was in development. Pressure on companies was exacerbated by growth in prices, especially on exported commodities, and a strong ruble.

Due to a deceleration of consumer inflation from 9.5% to 5.6%, the Bank of Russia began the cycle of gradual rate reduction. We see that already the first cycle of reduction is affecting lending activity, but that impulse is still not enough to improve the situation.

We see that the key parameter by which you can assess potential growth in the future is investment dynamics. For three quarters in a row, investment dynamics was negative, and further reduction of rates may, as we expect, stop this negative dynamic, maybe turn it around.

We looked into the key rate that may be favorable for slight growth in investment activity, and we believe it is around 12%. It should be around 12% per annum.

What we're expecting is reaching that rate as soon as possible because when we do, this will level out dynamics across the economy. For the banking sector, 2025 was a challenging year as well.

The profits in the industry decreased 8% year-over-year. If you remove Sberbank out of the equation, the decrease will be even more dramatic than that.

Capital adequacy last year became the main challenge for the banking industry. One of the factors that I didn't mention is tighter regulation, among other things, across a number of parameters.

This particular factor does now and will continue to have critical importance for increasing lending in 2026 and 2027. Last year, we increased our capital by 16% to 8.4 trillion rubles, while capital adequacy increased from 13.3% to 13.7%, that is capital adequacy under N20.0, despite having paid record-high dividends last year of 787 billion rubles in mid-year.

Half of that amount went to our minority shareholders, and it's great to see that their number is growing. Today this number exceeds 2 million.

The other half, or 394 billion rubles, went to the state as our controlling shareholder. I should note that Sber is among the largest taxpayers in Russia.

The total amount of our taxes and insurance payments last year was 948 billion rubles. This means that the total amount of revenues to the consolidated budget, state budget, for 2025 exceeded 1.3 trillion rubles.

The growth of equity due to high margins allowed us to invest in the development of the group's services for our clients, in particular in retail. In 2025, we got 800,000 new clients, and today we have almost 111 million clients in total.

The number of monthly users of our SberBank Online and SberKids apps grew by 2 million to 87.6 million. Last year, we updated our loyalty program to enable our clients to select categories for increased cashback.

As a result, the number of SberSpasibo loyalty program members exceeded 100 million. In 2025, our clients spent over 134 billion Spasibo bonus points.

SberPrime subscription currently has almost 23 million users, and just recently was recognized as the most balanced multiservice subscription on the Russian market. SberPrime+ became the best, the most profitable among high-income clients.

Today 117 million people use the Sber ID accounts to log in to the services of Sber and our partners. Since the beginning of the year, the number has grown by more than 22 million.

We continued to develop an ecosystem around our clients' life scenarios. For example, we created a special section called For Life, a personal lifestyle space within SberBank Online that serves as a one-stop shop for financial and everyday use cases.

More than 50 million people have used it already, and more than 20 million clients appreciated the convenience of performing daily tasks in the Home section, and 5.5 million motorists used the Auto space. This whole ecosystem is underpinned by our GigaChat AI assistant.

It is a cognitive layer that works on the client's side. It includes 16 AI agents that are available on eight key digital services.

Every month, they advise over 12 million retail clients. In 2026, we aim to improve the AI assistant and equip it with a deep understanding of each user's personal context.

AI has also been protecting our clients' money. Sber's antifraud system uses more than 100 AI models, and it is a multimodal system that includes hundreds of specialized agents.

It ensures maximum effectiveness. According to our own records and globally, it is unparalleled.

The effectiveness stands at 99.99%. Essentially, within a single bank, we won over fraud.

0.01%, well, that is negligible. We, of course, aimed at 100%.

We are almost there, and given the scale of our business, I would say that 0.01% is, well, still something we need to deal with, but it means that we have been able to save millions and millions in customer funds. This is an achievement that we take pride in.

I can't think of any other examples in the world, especially with companies that would be in similar conditions as we are. A landmark achievement of 2025 was Sber's recognition as the global acquiring leader, according to the Nilson Report rating.

It was the first time we took the top spot. That was the result of years of investment in our own innovations and infrastructure.

We process over 100,000 transactions per minute. We expanded our range of transactional solutions and were the first in Russia to return the possibility to pay with an iOS device by introducing the Woosh service.

Its daily audience in Russia is now over 2.5 million people. Biometrics-based payments are gaining popularity among our clients, and in 2025, they became available across 1.5 million terminals.

The number of monthly service users almost doubled over the year, while the volume of payments grew sevenfold and exceeded 150 billion rubles. Once again, with our scale, that sounds timid, but still, it is a new service, and it always takes, sometimes several years, for it to start working properly and become a full-blown service.

Already we see that it is gaining momentum. I personally forgot the last time I used a card because I'm so used to performing transactions with my own face, with my biometrics.

It's very convenient. AI, our main technology, the technology that is front and center for us, continues to develop.

Its applications in lending and risk assessments enables market share growth even in today's challenging conditions, and it also ensures an acceptable risk profile. Our retail loan portfolio grew by 6% since the beginning of the year to 19.2 trillion rubles.

Sber's share in the retail lending market increased by 1.4 percentage points to the record-high 49.4% throughout our history. Especially back when we only had the bank, of course, we couldn't have imagined such a share.

Amid expected changes in the state program for family mortgages, home lending became a key growth driver, especially in November and December. The portfolio grew by 11.6% since the beginning of the year to 12.5 trillion rubles.

Our share in the mortgage market increased by 2.6 percentage points to 57%. Amid high deposit rates, people started to save more.

Retail deposits increased in real terms by 22.1% and reached 33.5 trillion rubles. This allowed us to maintain our market leadership and make sure that our share gained 1.5 percentage points and exceeded 44.2%.

During the year, the number of corporate clients increased by more than 200,000 to 3.5 million companies. We are also working on our loyalty program for them.

Already about 1 million companies actively use SberBusiness Spasibo. For corporate clients, we have created a full-fledged GenAI stack that has all the tools you need to integrate AI in your business.

Several thousand companies, including industry leaders, already leverage GenAI solutions by Sber. Our all-purpose AI Giga Assistant in SberBusiness is now available to more than 3 million users.

More than 50 AI agents work on the SberBusiness platform to perform independent, everyday business tasks of entrepreneurs. For example, an AI agent for business development planning finds a company's areas of growth and generates individual scaling scenarios based on performance indicators.

An AI agent participating in tenders can draft documentation, calculate the terms, and submit a bid for participation in a tender. AI also helps us grow our corporate lending.

The size of our AI-driven portfolio exceeded 5 trillion rubles. In 2025, Sber approved more than 700 AI-assisted transactions for housing construction funding for the total amount of 1.3 trillion rubles.

As a result, our total corporate loan portfolio increased by 15.4% year-to-date to 31.2 trillion rubles in real terms, while the share of our corporate lending market increased to 32.8%, that is plus 0.4 percentage points over the year. For 2026, we set an ambitious goal to migrate the majority of transactions to a fully automated process.

AI solutions form the basis of a comprehensive risk management system designed to provide a reliable risk profile for the entire group. Despite the high interest rates pressure and economic slowdown, our cost of risk during the year amounted to 1.3%, which is slightly better than our own expectations.

The expected cost of risk was 1.5%. The quality of the total loan portfolio is at an acceptable level as well.

The share of Stage 3 loans amounted to 4.86%. GenAI helps us maintain high operational efficiency.

At the end of 2025, our cost-to-income ratio did not change and stayed at 30.3%. According to this metric, Sber is in the top five largest banks in the world with a capitalization of more than $50 billion.

GenAI has already become indispensable in optimizing our IT processes. We use GigaCode, the multi-agent platform GigaStudio, to write code.

With GigaStudio, the accuracy of its text generation is 87% now, and now such no-code solutions decrease the journey from an idea to working solution. Our suite of AI tools accelerates the product development process by an average factor of two to four, and nearly 50% of AI-generated code is accepted by developers without changes.

However, we are still at the early stage of GenAI transformation and will move to autonomous software development in the future. The introduction of AI agents is not limited to our technology team.

We rethink everything our organization does. Currently, Sber is developing more than 900 agents, 950 agents to be precise, that will improve the efficiency of all of our teams.

For example, in cybersecurity, we have implemented the multi-agent system called Cyber Analytics, which autonomously addresses 70% of cyber incidents. It also reduced the time for risk events analysis by more than 20 times.

Overall, our teams are working on more than 670 GenAI initiatives, while the economic effect from GenAI solutions based on GigaChat is estimated to be 51 billion rubles in 2025. This year, in 2026, we plan to double this indicator.

The total effect on profit from AI in 2025 amounted to almost 475 billion rubles, of which 51 billion is GenAI. All of our GenAI solutions are based on our proprietary fundamental model, GigaChat.

Its development remains our strategic priority. In 2025, the monthly audience of GigaChat increased tenfold to 19 million active users, and the number of prompts exceeded 800 million.

At the end of the year, we released a new generation of our GigaChat 3.0 and Kandinsky 5.0 models to the public domain, which became Europe's largest open-source release. We believe that the development of our own fundamental model is not only a prerequisite for our future competitiveness, but also a key element of Russia's technological sovereignty.

2025 was the watershed year for us in terms of GenAI implementation. This required major investments in team development, training, and completely changing our attitude toward the radically new opportunities that generative AI opens up.

I can assure you that these investments are already paying off. Last year, we optimized our headcount and reallocated the resources to new, disruptive tasks.

These changes lay a solid foundation for Sber's development for many years. In conclusion, I would like to give you our outlook and approaches that we are going to use in 2026.

Amid the expected gradual easing of monetary and credit policy, we are slightly revising our GDP forecast upwards to 1% to 1.5% percentage points. We are also revising upwards our expectations for the corporate lending market and the growth of our funds due to customers.

In terms of our target financial indicators, we maintain our guidelines mentioned earlier, including the 22% ROE and the capital adequacy ratio at 13.3%. We want to make sure that we are fully compliant with the strategy that we adopted 3 years ago.

We understand that this year, it would be even more challenging to achieve these parameters given the macroeconomic situation, pretty challenging situation with macroeconomics, and the fact that many of our customers face major challenges and the fact that the key rate is going to go down gradually. The year will be challenging, but at the same time, we are committed to achieving all of our parameters.

This is what we have committed to before our shareholders and our clients and investors, as well as the Supervisory Board. We need to make sure that we are in line with the commitments that were made so that you continue to trust us.

2026 will be an important milestone for us, and it will be the final year of the 3-year strategic cycle. Already now we have started to set a goal for the next strategic period until 2029 with a focus of an AI-native business model that will make it possible to transform Sber into a human-centric company.

We will definitely share our ideas about this new strategy with you at the end of the year. Thank you for your attention, and I'm happy to answer your questions.

Good afternoon, colleagues, Mr. Gref.

Thank you very much for the presentation. I congratulate you with such great results in such a challenging year.

I have a couple of questions. I'd like to start with the regulation.

From the 1st of March, there will be additional add-ons for the largest companies. Do you expect the growth of spreads related to key rates for the new issuance in the corporate sector?

Maybe the old loans will be refinanced, and will it have a major influence on your ROE metrics that are not factored in into your 2026 forecast? Thank you.

Thank you very much for your question. We tried to factor in and assess the influence of this add-on, this buffer, for the current period.

You have to understand that, well, the Central Bank made this add-on for the future periods, and thank the bank for that. We do not disclose the information about individual customers in our corporate portfolio, yet the share of these customers, the so-called customers with high indebtedness, is pretty low in our portfolio and pretty small.

It will definitely affect the dynamics of the new loans for such companies, but I do not think that this will have a major effect on the dynamics of our portfolio or on the cost of risk. It will affect the lending dynamics, that's true.

For some large companies, we will have to find individual, unique solutions. I think the more rational way would be for them to find some other ways to raise funding, other from the banking sector.

Yes, thank you very much. If I may, I would ask you other questions.

Building on that topic of the regulation, if you look at that strategically, there is a feeling that the measures of the Central Bank, the current measures and the planned measures like the risk weights, possible additional add-on for the systemic importance and other measures, asymmetrically affect the largest banks, especially if you talk about the dividend payout commitments. Do you think that this regulation might encourage the fact that some of the credit business will be migrated from the largest banks to smaller players?

Yes, thank you very much, Evgeny. You are a bank analyst, we can see that.

Very correct questions. In the first part, I will agree with you.

It is obvious that the regulation and other things are targeting large banks, including us. In the mid-term, if you're talking about the mid-term, we see we have some measures in place to ensure that we do not face these limitations and restrictions.

We're working on that. For sure, we are not going to drive down our lending activity because of that.

You have to appreciate the fact that large banks have their specific nature. The migration of our customers to smaller banks, theoretically is possible, but in real life, it's not possible.

We do not expect major changes related to the macroprudential add-ons or the risk-sensitive limits. I think we have the room for maneuver to address this restriction.

I do not think it will generate major business problems.

Understood. Thank you very much.

If I may, one more question, the last one, about the quality of the credit portfolio. We can see that you have a pretty good Q4 in cost of risk in corporate and retail portfolios.

In 2026, based on the forecasts of your organization and others, this year will be, in terms of the dynamics, more or less the same as the 2025. At the same time, the key rate will be decreased significantly.

Can you say that the provisions cycle has ended? What are the trends in corporate loans repayment?

Thank you.

Yes, Evgeny, thank you very much for the question. The picture that we see is as follows: The cost in the retail for new loans is going down.

If the dynamics of the retail portfolio rebounds, the cost of risk will go down compared to the previous year. In the corporate sector, the situation is different a little bit.

You cannot have such an extended period of time with such a high rate, real rate, and expect no negative consequences. The high rates have been in place for the third year, the real rate in our calculations is around 11 percentage points to the annualized inflation, the inflation that has been calculated for the last 3 months.

Obviously, it will affect the financial situation of the company, and it will affect the cost of risk, therefore. In the corporate risk, the cost of risk will go up.

It's likely to happen. It's hard to say what will be the dynamics of the rate, what will happen in the next 6 months.

We think that the cost of risk will remain the same as in the previous year. That's our current vision.

I cannot really tell you with 100% certainty that this or that will be the dynamics in the retail sector, because the year has just started, it's hard to figure out the trends. We are in a very dynamic macroeconomic and geopolitical situation.

During these times, it's very hard to tell you what will happen in the end of the year. This is the vision that we have: The retail is going to be a bit better.

The corporates will be a bit worse, but the level will be almost the same as in the previous year.

Thank you very much. Svetlana Aslanova from Elliott will ask the next question.

Svetlana, make sure to switch on the mic. Olga Naydenova, Sinara, will have the next question.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, please.

Thank you very much for giving the opportunity to ask a question, and congratulations with great results. I have a couple of questions as well.

One related with the net interest income. Your interest margin is growing up significantly, but it's thanks to the insurance business mostly.

For better understanding the dynamics of the income of the lending business and the situation in the insurance business, it will be great to understand how the insurance business income is reflected in the net interest income.

NIM is pretty good, that's true, and it is growing. The margin is growing in the insurance businesses as well.

I can now not really tell you what is the balance between the influence of these two. Last year, we have went through the tipping point in terms of the insurance.

I won't say that we're very much happy with our wealth management team, but we have gone through the tipping point. We have changed the trends.

In a number of areas, we have significantly increased our share. We have a pretty good margin indicator, and we have a pretty good outlook for this year.

We think that the margin and the growth of our share in the insurance market will be the main drivers, and we hope they will be the main drivers. We had to spend a number of years to relaunch our insurance business, and I'm fearful of being too optimistic about that because this relaunch, this redesign was very challenging.

We had to redesign our technology team there. It is a very complicated market in all areas.

Knock wood, but I would say that, hopefully, this year will be better than the previous year. I am trying to be very cautiously optimistic here.

It's not that I'm sure, but we have some very good chances of showing some good results in this business this year. I can see that the team is working to the right end, and looks pretty good.

We have moved from the discussions and debates and strategic planning cycle to the real implementation, to the execution. I hope that by the end of the year, we will give you some good results.

I think that, to be honest, I didn't expect such a question. I don't have the data for that, but we will give you more data afterwards.

Thank you very much. I have another question related to the acceleration of the operational expenses growth for the headcount and as well as the depreciation of tangible and intangible assets.

What do you expect will happen this year? What is the dynamics that you see right now in terms of the headcount and in terms of the labor costs?

Thank you very much for the question. The dynamics is as follows: Last year, we had no dynamics for the payroll.

We were in line with the planned expenses. I do not know any other company in Russia who would optimize the labor costs so much.

We have done a lot of work in 2025. I think that this year, the dynamics will remain the same, more or less.

As for the headcount, we do not see any extreme indicators, any major problems. As for the intangible assets, we are understandably increase our costs, our expenses on training models, and this is a major driver for the growth of our investments, and therefore, it's related to the amortization.

We have to do that. In the nearest years, we are going to see the growth of the investments, of the expenses, as well as the amortization.

Unfortunately, there's a problem with the regulation, everything related to training and the development of a software product. I think there is a lot of room for maneuvering and discussing that with the public authorities so that these costs cannot be amortized.

We have all the logic that would support our position in this debate, and we will work with the regulator to make sure that we do not work in these extreme conditions. I do agree with you, you are correct, the dynamics will be higher than expected.

I think last year, compared to the last year, it was what, 20%? That will be around 20%.

Investors around the world are concerned with GenAI investments, but thanks to the fact that we started to implement AI a long time ago, our cumulative AI-driven profits helps us to pay off the GenAI investments. Because we have stopped the investments in the traditional AI, all the investments are going to GenAI right now.

If you compare the GenAI investments with the profits, with the additional income, it's not comparable. If you take the overall figure, it is a pretty good figure that I've named.

It is a pretty good figure of the AI-generated profit. We are going to drive the investments, and I think that, yes, it will be unproportionate, of course, but it will be positive.

We have zero chance not to invest in the technology. There's a couple of reasons for that, I'm not going to dive deep into that topic.

Overall, I think we are in a privileged position, I would say. We're not planning to allocate as colossal of expenses as our colleagues in the US, for example, but we will be trying to hit a balance.

It is going to be very challenging to find that balance in terms of investment in AI, but we will try to find it and maintain it.

Yes, thank you very much. Sorry about that technical hiccup.

Thank you very much for allowing me to ask my question. As a sort of follow-up on the question about IT investments, investments in AI, I would like to ask you to clarify your take on the Bank of Russia regulations concerning non-banking assets.

If the suggested regulations are adopted, will it limit somewhat your investment in IT or other aspects of your non-banking business? Thank you.

We are not planning any group structure changes because of the suggested new regulations. All in all, we support the efforts of the Bank of Russia to improve regulation, but we believe there is still room for improvement.

There is still room for clarifying the measures that are suggested in the bill. Specifically, we believe that an important job is to once again find optimal balance in forming the regulatory perimeter, because currently this perimeter contains anything and everything.

We are currently engaged in a constructive dialogue with the Bank of Russia in order to find the golden mean there. A separate issue is removing from that perimeter a group of companies and including in the perimeter some non-material ones in terms of our scale.

We have discussed these topics on a number of occasions, and following the novations, we will be able to suggest an optimal model for the Central Bank, a model that will allow us, in particular, to continue our operations. For now, I do not think this is a source of any major threat for us.

We do have, of course, our own ideas regarding the optimization within the group to prevent any adverse effects of suggested regulations.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Hello, Mr.

Gref. Congratulations on the results.

Thank you for opening the floor for me. I have two questions.

First question, a follow-up on the previous question about regulation. The Bank of Russia in particular plans in the next few years to increase capital adequacy ratios and introduce a diversified approach to those norms.

Sber is the biggest bank, and so pressure on the capital may grow significantly. What is your take on these measures?

Are you prepared for this introduction? If these measures are implemented fully, according to your estimates, will the bank be able to maintain 50% to allocate 50% of its profits to pay dividends?

I believe that's not a question for 2026, but for a longer-term perspective. Thank you.

It's hard for me to comment on what's going to happen because right now we do not fully understand the vector that the Bank of Russia has assumed. It's a bit difficult to make estimates for such a long term, given the uncertainty.

The one thing I can say is that today the banking industry is clearly facing capital inadequacy, the largest banks first and foremost. The regulator will, of course, be considering the capability of the banks to replenish their capital and to maintain efficient lending.

From that perspective, I think the last will suffer the most, but we are among the first ones. The 13 trillion buffer that we have puts us in a rather comfortable position, we can be rather optimistic about our own future.

Even if the regulatory limits are raised significantly, we will not be suffering that much from that growth. We'll be able to raise our own internal limits, I suppose.

If we were alone on this platform, I think we could exchange our opinions on this, but I personally do not think that the objective situation will allow the regulator to adopt extreme measures in terms of capital adequacy. Once again, this is not a source of major threat for us.

Thank you very much. Question number two, a more concrete one.

In 2025, Sber recorded losses from other financial operations, as I take it, it concerns the ecosystem. What do you think about the development of the ecosystem?

There are still some losses, but what do you think about the further evolution of the segment? Maybe you will exit the capital, maybe you will venture into some other areas with your ecosystem?

Thank you.

Thank you for the question. Last year, we worked really hard in that regard.

We almost halved the amount of our losses, and across a number of areas, a number of segments, we achieved significant results. We raised our financial efficiency.

In particular, over the past quarter, we hit all of our targets in terms of optimization, and I believe this dynamic will persist. We will be gradually transitioning to sustainability, to financial results.

Within non-financial services, we are less flexible in terms of customizing our offer for different scenarios. We do have to factor in all the multiplicative effects that we have on our core business.

In this respect, we can move certain services to a break-even point, but given their effect on the core business, they are financially positive for us, all in all, all things considered. Be it shadow accounting, shifting from one type of business to another, we see this with some of our counterparts, our colleagues in business that are bundling together loss-making and high-margin businesses in order to show that all in all, the services are profit-making.

This is not the tactic that we are assuming for ourselves. We do not believe this is optimal for us.

We will be gradually bringing all of our services to a break-even point. Once again, I reiterate that anything that holds no promise, that holds no potential or significant financial effect on our core business or some stand-alone benefits in terms of breaking even, all of those things will be optimized, will be sold, maybe.

Overall, we will try to make sure that all of our businesses in the next few years break even and start making profit. Thank you.

Thank you, Mikhail. Let me read out the question that you sent to our QR code channel: What is the strategy of Sber regarding the Sberbank of Russia element?

You've recently acquired a share there. Are you planning to make this a company public after the offer?

This is one of the key companies that ensures our technology independence and competitive edge countrywide. In the AI and high-tech era, being able to manufacture own hardware-software suites is absolutely critical.

This company, I forgot its name, I don't use its products personally, but for some reason, over the past year, it skyrocketed with a capitalization of 4.5 trillion, if I'm not mistaken. That shows you the significance of this.

These are our joint efforts, our collaboration with the government. On February 25th, we sent this mandatory offer, 14.6 kopecks per share.

Everything was done according to law. All of the minority shareholders that would like to take advantage of this offer are welcome to do so.

The quotations really really grew after that offer. Thank you.

A question from Ilya Maratchenkov from Aton.

Good afternoon, colleagues. Mr.

Gref, thank you for the call. Thank you for another great year.

Congratulations on another great year. My first question is about capital.

You answered a lot of questions about macroprudential add-ons and capital adequacy. Are there any other important aspects about capital?

Are you expecting any one-off effects that have an impact on capital? VTB recently made a statement about the sale of securitized assets.

Is that something that you are going to do? Another question about the hold-to-maturity OFZ on your balance sheet.

What is going to happen with those given your capital adequacy?

Ilya, is this call boring?

No, no, not at all. It's very interesting.

I hope you hold it more often. No, I mean with us as a company.

No, I think your company is one of the best in the market and very good IR department. Then we will not be able to surprise you with anything.

We will not be able to give you anything unexpected. That's good, but given your results, once again, great results, I suppose the lack of one-off events, one-off effects is a good sign.

We will only be surprising you with our stability, I suppose. One-off is not about us.

That's not our story. I've been at the helm of this organization for I forgot how many years, the last 10 years at least.

As soon as we configured this management of the company and we closed the small gaps in the multibillion balance sheet, we have not been surprising you with anything other than sustainable results. No one-offs, positive or negative, should be expected.

Anything that comes up in terms of one-off write-offs is something that is done according to plan. We are a rather conservative bank.

If you look at the reserves, the provisions that we form, you will see that we are one of the most conservative banks in the market. I don't like surprises, be it pleasant or unpleasant, because pleasant surprises usually have unpleasant consequences.

We do not have any surprises for you, sorry to disappoint. Do not expect any dramatic ups or downs, any sudden write-offs, or a trillion that we pull out of the pockets all of a sudden.

The second question, the revaluation of OFZ securities, well, yes, we are a large holder of those securities, and if there is unplanned revaluation, we will be still beneficiaries with a plus sign or a minus sign. Once again, nothing unexpected.

We have the amount of our portfolio. Yes, this will happen.

Right. Thank you, Mr.

Gref. Another question, if I may, about your fee and commission income.

Are there any new sources of such income, maybe some growth points in that regard related to AI or AI monetization? Thank you.

Regarding the net fee and commission income, we have adopted this strategy of gradual abandonment of poisoned, disloyal commissions. I'm talking about fees and commissions that our clients think are unfair, to speak.

Last year, we made very good progress in that regard. Understandably, we cannot do this overnight.

It is a very delicate, very sensitive thing for our business, abandoning all those fees and commissions in just 1 year. We are moving towards it step by step to remove anything that is a hurdle for the customer experience.

In a number of areas, the fee and commission income is increasing, but this is healthy growth. With some other fees and commissions, the goal is the opposite: we need to abandon those.

I expect to see better dynamics of growth of net fee and commission income. Once again, no miracles, nothing unexpected.

We do see some area for growth for offering brand-new products for the market, specifically products based on AI that will yield much more significant growth in net fee and commission income and will also give us benefits for other business streams, including for the B2B area. Here we are lagging behind, significantly, other markets in terms of demand.

Companies are just starting to adopt and embrace the changes, and what we see is, unfortunately, often a situation where companies struggle to make a fair assessment of market dynamics. Shareholders, top managers make linear assessments of the changes, even though those changes are bound to be non-linear.

Just yesterday, I sent this very interesting article to my colleagues, written as a fan fiction, to speak, or a fantasy novel about what might happen in the key markets as an aftermath of AI development, what the situation in macroeconomics may be with the current pace of development of multi-agent systems. The development of this so-called agent economy.

It is a kind of a science fiction article that looks like a socialist realism really. It looks like that very much.

The implementation of technologies is going to lag behind a little bit maybe in our country, but the development opportunities are going to be tremendous. You have to prioritize the way you organize this new world, how the markets are going to be organized.

The financial markets are going to be disrupted in a major way. In this regard, we have potential.

If we are going to respond in a timely fashion, if we are going to change and tailor the models to the needs of our customers, I think we will not only be able to maintain our competitive edge of our own business, but we will be able to grow in a major way our fee and commission income. Thank you very much.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes. Hello.

Thank you very much, Mr. Gref.

Thank you very much for giving the opportunity to ask the question. Two questions: The government is still discussing the platform economy, and there is a question of pricing and marketplaces, and there was a memorandum discussed that would regulate the relations with the marketplaces and large banks.

Is Sber ready to have a memorandum with one of such a players? What would be the optimal model, do you think?

Look, we have a very simple position: The competition field should be a level playing field. The conditions should be the same.

We are ready to sign a memorandum. We are ready to resolve this issue through regulation, but there should be no terrible conditions for the other market players, because this skews the competitive edge towards the marketplaces in a major way.

Talking about memorandums and signing memorandums, well, we were offered to sign a memorandum by one of the marketplaces. We've looked at it, and that was really laughable because it's hard for me to really come up with the word here, but anyway, I would say that it was not a partnership approach.

We are not going to sign any memorandums that do not ensure equal partnership. It should be based on the understanding of the current market situation.

If we're talking about ensuring the competitiveness of everyone, we're ready to sign everything.

Thank you. The second question: The banks in Russia thinks that the VAT transfer will have some secondary effects.

What is the situation for corporate customers? Are there any secondary effects, how the companies adapted, and

maybe small businesses, they're moving to the gray zone to make sure that they do not overlimit this discounted VAT conditions? I think that we got the major leap related to the VAT in January.

I think that already in March, we will not see the consequences of VAT increase. By the way, it's really surprising that some of the ministers thought that it will not be reflected in the prices, that the businesses will just get the costs and cover the costs themselves.

We have discussed that the margins in a number of industries, they just do not have any room for maneuver to cover the costs. They were translated to the prices for the customers.

That some of our transactions were also affected. As for the acquiring prices for the small businesses, we made it 50/50, I think.

We have 500,000 companies that are covered. Yes, and we have around 500,000 companies that got 1% of VAT increase, and they kind of held it in their balance.

As for the other companies, it's obvious that it's going to be translated in the end prices. Obviously, in the end, we got this inflation peak, and I think that this peak is over.

We won't see it in March. As for the cashless flow, money flow, does it affect that?

We had a pretty good positive dynamics in terms of cashless transactions. It has stalled because it's obvious that a number of tax initiatives led to the fact that the migration to the cashless arrangements is stopped.

I cannot really say that we have seen the influence of the VAT increase in this dynamics. I think that by the end of the first quarter, we'll be able to see it, and we will talk about that if we see that.

For now, I cannot really tell you that it was reflected there. We were champions of the world in a number of indicators here, and first of all, about the dynamics, that's for sure, and we have lost this dynamics.

I think, yes, it is a reflection of the fact that the potential of tax innovations is going to be depleted soon. I think it will be hard to get the taxes up again without major negative consequences.

Thank you very much.

Hello, I have a couple of questions. The first one, a quick one: Do you plan to maintain your 50% commitment from the net profit for dividend payout?

Do you plan to maintain this commitment? Another question, the new requirements to the capital will not affect you in a major way.

This is your mid-term plan to move 50% of the net profit for the dividends. I'll ask next questions after that.

Just fire all the questions. I'll answer them.

Okay.

Since we talked about the problematic customers, what are the industries that you are most concerned about? Because it has been said that the housing real estate industry is not of major concern, but we see a case where a company faces major challenges and you are one of the major creditors of this company.

There was another question about credit activity. You have told that the current impulse is not enough for the growth of the credit activity.

The preliminary data on January and February shows the decrease in a number of sectors, the corporate lending, and the demand for lending is not doing good. Do you think it is a trend or do you think these factors are more seasonal than anything?

Anastasia, thank you very much. Right.

I'll start with the last question. With the last question and the first question: dividends, yes.

This year, we plan to deliver on our commitment on paying out 50% of our profit in dividends. As for the outlook, we are going to talk about that in December.

In December, we're going to present you the final version of our strategy for the next 3 years. As for the large cases and the construction company that you talked about, Samolet Group, oh, this one.

Look, rumors that the Samolet Group will stop building, will stop existing is a bit overrated. They became victims of wrong PR campaign.

They went to the authorities to increase taxes to cover the deficit with the easy money, and that was a very weird story for me really. It turned out bad for them.

Anyway, we do not see any critical situation here. They got the money beforehand.

They paid out the 17 billion in February, I think. They had enough liquidity.

They were able to manage it properly. We regularly monitor their dashboards.

The majority of the loans are project finance loans that are fully secured by the escrows. I don't see any major problems there.

They have some corporate lending volume, but it is secured as well. Many people are telling me how this construction company, Samolet, is going to die very soon, but I do not really see that.

It's a pretty regular situation. They have more debt than is good for them, but I do not see it as a critical situation.

I think they're the ones to blame for these rumors to spread. They're talking about the commercial real estate, the residential real estate, it is obvious that the high rates, as well as the decreased state support, the fact that there's too many flats in the inventory of the construction companies in the regions, the fact that the moratorium for the fines has been removed, for now we cannot really tell you if this fact is going to be critical, but obviously, it is going to have a major effect.

I think that they were not very cautious about that. They thought that this is going to last forever.

The government has never planned it to be a forever arrangement to have this sanctions-free regime. It might be a major problem for many companies.

We're looking at the company-by-company basis. We're analyzing the situation.

There is a number of things that are of concern. Again, there were major amounts.

This is a large player, 60% market share. Anyway, we're talking about totally different quality.

We do not have any critical concerns. We're very conservative.

We have good provisions. We have good LCR indicators.

In this case, I do not think we will see any major problems, even if one of the players suddenly faces some major challenges in any of these markets. I do not think it will cause major problems for us.

The fact that we're cautious and conservative in terms of risk management helps us to talk about that with confidence. It's better to overestimate the risk rather than to underestimate it, and you know that I'm very cautious in given my ideas about that.

Every week, we have a special committee. We look at the industries, at the cases.

We see some deterioration of the quality, of course. It's not possible not to see that.

I have talked about a number of industries with negative dynamics, that showed negative dynamics during the year. The cost of risk will deteriorate, but I do not think it will be radical.

At least I'm talking about our portfolio. It's hard for me to analyze the portfolios of other banks, but the situation is not that problematic.

If the Central Bank is so good as to add some speed to the decrease of the key rate, it will affect the investments activity dynamics and it will add stability for the credit portfolios of the bank. There was another question about the negative dynamics in January, and is it seasonal?

No, I think it's seasonal. Standard thing.

The last year seasonal fluctuations were pretty obvious, and nothing to see here.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes. Yes, please.

I have a question about the ruble exchange rate. When do you think the ruble will start changing the direction of the growth?

Secondly, in Tuesday, there was the discussion with Mr. Putin and Mr.

Mishustin about the budget deficit. You have also revised your forecast on the economic growth this year.

What were the drivers for that? Thank you.

The dynamics of the economic growth cannot be assessed in February. There's a number of parameters, including the one that you have mentioned, the dynamics of the ruble exchange rate.

This year, I see zero chances of seeing such a strong ruble rate. It is counterproductive and counterintuitive and whatever other adjectives that you can use.

It is against all theories, because last year, our payment balance was 40 billion. This year, it is obviously going to be lower than that.

Having the exchange rate of 80 rubles per dollar with these parameters is going to be absolutely incredible if that really happens. You cannot rule out anything, but it will be against theory, practice, and logic and other things.

Expectations, our colleagues believe, are more conservative, they think that it will be around 85-90 rubles per dollar. My personal expectation will be around 95 rubles per dollar by the end of the year, maybe given the circumstances, might be around 100.

It will depend on the policy of the Central Bank. That our Minister of Finance changed the budget rule, and if this transaction mirroring is decreased, the ruble rate will go down.

With such discounts and such oil prices, it must go down, because these two factors in combination will lead to the fact that the exchange rate by the end of the second quarter will change. It's hard to predict the parameters according to which it's going to grow.

It isn't very intuitive, to speak. I have said that our macroeconomists think that it will be 85-90.

Again, we appreciate the fact that there are two components here. The first one is the volume of the mirroring transactions and the payment balance.

If the payment balance is between 10 and 15, the Bank of Russia will be gradually pulling out of the market. Meanwhile, it should be 95 to 100 by the end of the year.

That said, still, if I do have to sign with blood on this forecast, I'm not sure I'll be able to do that.

Thank you very much to all the participants. Thank you, colleagues, for your time, for joining today, and thank you for your support.

I do sometimes feel a bit adventurous myself, but I think you can find different ways of entertainment. It doesn't have to concern financial results, especially when it comes to the assets of millions and millions of people and companies.

We try to be stable. We try to be predictable.

Our surprises for you are about being stable amid a very unstable and uncertain environment. It is way more difficult than doing somersaults of volatility and freestyling in front of an excited audience.

I think we will be freestyling internally, and we will be demonstrating to you stability and robust financial results. I hope you appreciate that.

I, once again, would like to thank you for your participation, for your questions. We are open to even more questions, even deeper questions.

We are always transparent for our shareholders. We will continue with this policy going forward.

The situation today is peculiar, with a lot of limitations, but as soon as that situation ends, we'll go back to the same transparency and level of disclosure that we had before. We will be disclosing all of the facts and figures so that you can see it for yourself.

I assure you, even though we cannot demonstrate all of the facts and figures that we would like at the moment, but I hope you can trust us. We have done our homework, and we're only demonstrating to you things that we ourselves are sure of.

Once again, thank you. I hope you're healthy, and I hope you have a great day.

Thank you very much. See you next time in April.