Santander stagnated its profit in the first quarter of the year due to the new Central Government tax on banks and a worse business result in Brazil and the United States.
The bank won 2,571 million euros, 1% more, but the result would have increased much more, 10%, and would have stood at 2,795 million if it had not had to pay 224 million euros for the lien. However, this payment is annual, so it will not appear again this year.
The bank’s CEO, Héctor Grisi, informed during his first press conference to defend the bank’s management that the entity has already challenged the tax and will not have much more impact on this aspect. He prefers to focus on “the aspects he can manage”.
Business fared worse in Brazil and the United States, two key regions for the group, which contributed to its shares falling 5.9% yesterday. In Brazil, the bank won 469 million euros, 29% less, compared to 300 million in the United States, 51% less.
Beyond the stock market turmoil, the bank was able to avoid the crisis of SVB and Credit Suisse. It is also benefiting from interest rate hikes, to the point that its gross margin, which includes both interest and commissions, increased by 13% and stood at 13,935 million euros.
Santander continues without informing when it will begin to raise the remuneration of the deposits. The entity, said Grisi, “will adapt to the market”. “We don’t have specific deposit offers, we will see them depending on the behavior of the market”, he insisted.
In January it registered “for seasonal reasons”, deposit outflows for 21,000 million which then recovered in February and March. In Spain the volume of deposits fell by 6.5% in the first quarter in relation to the previous one, up to 301,000 million euros, but it is 7.4% above what was recorded in the first quarter of 2022.
Despite the Credit Suisse crisis, Santander “is seeing an enormous facility to have liquidity”, and as long as there is liquidity it is difficult for banks to want to improve the remuneration of deposits.
Grisi also sent a message of reassurance over the collapses of SVB and Credit Suisse. They are “isolated cases” and “80% of our deposits are guaranteed by the guarantee funds of the different countries”, he said. “We have seen people quite calm.”
In Spain, the attributable profit for the first quarter was 466 million euros, 28% more than in the same period of the previous year. Revenue rose 26%, buoyed by the growth of 700,000 customers, among other things. Deposits grew by 7% to 301 billion, while loans fell by 3%.
