NBK, Kuwait’s biggest bank by market value, announced today a bottom line growth of 4% in FY09. Profits recorded were KD265.3 million compared to 255.3 in FY08. Q4 earnings surged from KD11.7 million in Q4 2008 to KD63.7 million in Q4 2009. This growth was mainly attributed to the bank’s expanded operations. Operating income increase by 2% to KD518 million and total assets rose by 7.8% to 12.9 billion. There were no details given on the level of provisions taken by the bank.

“Our regional expansion strategy proved successful as confirmed by the resilience of our profits and the diversity of our income sources. Our operations outside Kuwait continued to provide a stronger foundation for the stability of our profits with growing contributions from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.” CEO Ibrahim Dabdoub said.

“National Bank of Kuwait’s results are in line with our expectations, and if you compare to last year it’s an improvement for sure. Kuwaiti banks have been more resilient to the global financial crisis than others” Naveed Ahmed, a financial analyst at Global Investment House.

The stock reacted positively to the announcement and closed at KD1.100, up 40 fils (3.7%). Results were kind of preannounced as CEO Ibrahim Dabdoub said at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland a couple of days ago that NBK expects to post a “small growth” in 2009 profit.

UPDATE:

NBK is currently trading at a P/B multiple of 2x, whereas the Kuwaiti and the GCC banking sector trade at a multiple of 1.8x and 1.4x respectively.

Tags: 2009 earning, National Bank of Kuwait, nbk, NBK 2009 earnings

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 12:52 am and is filed under Kuwait. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.