NBG Trifecta – Earnings, Management Change, Tsipras Meeting in Germany

George Zanias will be replaced by former minister Louka Katseli as chairman. Leonidas Fragiadakis is replacing Alexandros Tourkolias as chief executive officer. Also at NBG, Mr. Stefanos Vavalidis, an independent non-executive director, also submitted his resignation.

Getting a new executive team may sound like a game-changing event, but this sometimes occurs in Greece after elections. The Syriza-led government has been in power for right at two months now. A smaller rival bank is Eurobank Ergasias announced board changes in February.

The news from Monday also coincided with meetings between Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The market was not expecting any rapid resolution in Greece — nor that Tsipras would provide any significant goals for the country to resolve a divide between the nation and European bank creditors.

National Bank of Greece also reported on Monday that it lost 1.11 billion euro in the fourth quarter. This was versus a 30 million gain in the third quarter, but the blame was on one-time charges and an increase in loan loss provisions (see net numbers below)

NBG actually posted a profit for the full year 2014 of 66 million euro. Unfortunately, that profit was north of 800 million euro in 2013. Still, NBG claims to have a 15 billion euro liquidity buffer as of mid-March — also by mid-March, NBG’s total Eurosystem exposure reached 23 billion euro, of which 13.3 billion were drawn from the ELA. The bank’s earnings release said:

Despite the increase of the Eurosystem exposure, NBG retains significant buffer of ELA eligible collateral of about 15 billion euro (cash value). As such, the bank retains a solid liquidity buffer allowing it to navigate through this challenging period and continue to actively support the Greek economy.

Other key issues investors may care about are as follows:

• Loan balances contracted by 1.9% (YoY) as deleveraging in the household segment continued steadily throughout the year.
• Time deposits continued to reprice throughout the year by almost 100bps, thus improving total deposit spread to -99bps in 4Q14 vs. -147bps a year earlier.
• Greek personnel costs dropped by 18% (YoY) leading total operating expenses down by 15% (YoY).
• Core pre-provision income (i.e. excluding trading and other income) rose by 76% (YoY) to 754 million euro. Including the negative non-core result, pre-provision income stood rose 32% (YoY) to 692 million euro.
• Fully loaded Basle III (2024 CRD IV rules) at 9.4%.

It was just last week that a report from Piraeus Bank has forecast that NBG would lose 933 million euro in its fourth quarter. Also last week, S&O announced that it was keeping the ‘CCC+’ long-term counterparty credit ratings on NBG and 3 other large Greek banks.

NBG’s ADRSs were up over 5% at $1.41 in late afternoon trading in New York on Monday. The 52-week range is $0.98 to $5.79. While it is good to see a gain here, it seems unlikely, at least with what we have seen and read so far, that any major Wall Street analysts are going to suddenly change their tune massively after having been burned handily by upgrading NBG shares or making any bold lines in the sand.