Sberbank’s (MCX:SBER) loan portfolio will grow by about 4% in 2022, including corporate loans – by 2%, the bank’s first deputy chairman Alexander Vedyakhin said in an interview with Interfax. “It will grow by about 4% (the total loan portfolio in 2022),” Vedyakhin said.

Speaking about the corporate loan portfolio, he noted that high interest rates for some time practically suspended the issuance of new loans to companies. “Also, the portfolio is strongly affected by currency revaluation. We have a significant part of the portfolio in foreign currency, and at the end of the year, against the background of efforts to devalutize, we expect a reduction in the foreign currency corporate portfolio by about 20%. At the same time, the ruble corporate loan portfolio will grow by about 8-9%, so in general, the growth of the entire corporate portfolio in ruble terms will be about 2%,” – said the first deputy chairman.

He added that at Sberbank at the end of May the share of currency in the corporate portfolio was about 17%. “At the beginning of the year this indicator was just over 22%. At the current exchange rate, we recommend clients to convert to rubles,” Vedyakhin said.

The conversion of foreign currency debt into ruble debt since the beginning of this year amounted to about 130 billion rubles, that is, about 3% of the foreign currency portfolio, he added.

Sberbank’s first deputy chairman of the board noted that corporate clients have requests for lending in yuan. “And this process will develop. We follow our client, and clients have gone to new jurisdictions, primarily Asia. I think they will also go to Africa, which will be the next direction that everyone will be interested in,” he said.

Earlier it was reported that Sberbank in 2021 increased the total loan portfolio under IFRS by 16.6% to 28.5 trillion rubles. The corporate loan portfolio in 2021 grew by 11.1% to 17.1 trillion rubles, retail by 25.9% to 11.5 trillion rubles.

According to RAS, in 2021, the bank increased loans to legal entities by 9.9%, to RUB 17.0 trillion, and to individuals by 25.8%, to RUB 10.7 trillion