BCR, the biggest bank on the market, is reeling from the effects of the crisis: assets went down by almost 1 billion euros in 2009 compared with 2008, to 15.1 billion euros, while net profit calculated by the international reporting standards (IFRS) stood at some 211 million euros, half the record profit posted in the previous year, according to banking sources.

Harsh provisioning requirements of NBR caused BCR's net profit by Romanian accounting standards (RAS) to drop to merely 47.5 million euros.

As for 2010, the bank management built an IFRS-compliant budget that includes a 13% increase in the net profit in RON, to more than 1 billion RON (about 243 million euros), while assets should go up by 6.5% to some 68 billion RON (16.5 billion euros).

At the same time, BCR set out to increase the volume of loans granted to clients by almost 17% to 54 billion RON (13.2 billion euros), compared with 46.1 billion RON in 2009 (11 billion euros). Last year, the volume of loans in BCR's balance sheet went up by merely 2.4%, almost 10 times slower than in 2008. The 2010 spending and revenue budget is to be approved by shareholders during the General Meeting set for the 27th of January.

Although lending did significantly slow down in BCR's case, provisions for losses caused by the deterioration of the asset quality leapt to more than 2 billion RON (almost half a billion euros). In 2010, their volume should go down to 1.8 billion RON based on the premises the bank's budget was built on.

As far as BCR group is concerned, the 2009 net profit stood at 185 million euros, lower than the bank's, mainly because of the about 10 million-euro losses of BCR Leasing.

BCR, the biggest bank on the market, is reeling from the effects of the crisis: assets went down by almost 1 billion euros in 2009 compared with 2008, to 15.1 billion euros, while net profit cal