Mark your calendars.
A slew of Greek banks will be reporting first-quarter earnings next week.
The schedule looks like this according to Credit Swiss (all times are UK time) :
- Bank of Cyprus will report on May 26 before the market open. Conference call at 9:30am.
- National Bank of Greece reports at 3:30pm on May 26. Conference call at 4pm.
- ATEBank reports May 27 after the market close. Conference call is at 4pm.
- Eurobank reports on May 27 after the close, followed by a conference call.
- Alpha reports on May 27 before the open. There is a conference call at 7:15am.
- Piraeus reports before the open on May 28. Conference call is at 7:30am.
And here are some things to watch out for, according to CS banking analyst Niall O’Connor:
■ Q1 figures will be negatively impacted by Greek government bond (GGB’s) holdings: on the P&L where there are big trading book holdings (NBG, Piraeus) and the equity where there are big [available-for-sale] holdings (NBG, EFG, Piraeus and ATE).
■ Otherwise we expect Q1 figures to be characterised by gradually rising provisions, and low deposit outflows.
If you were expecting more of an impact from those controversial rumours of deposit runs, or newly-introduced austerity measures, however, it looks like you’ll have to wait until the second quarter:
The Greek banks’ Q1 2010 is unlikely to be as interesting as Q2. The major falls in confidence, Greek bond and share prices happened in early May: well after the end of Q1. And the austerity measures won’t have had any time to bite in Q1 in terms of rising NPL’s either. So we would expect Q1 would be too early to see either significant worsening in provisioning, or significant deposit outflows. Trading income will have been impacted, but Q2 is at least for now set to be a much more illuminating quarter.
Related links:
Bank Grεεkery – FT Alphaville
Italy suspends mark-to-market accounting on Greek bonds – FT Alphaville