Ceska sporitelna saw its profits fall 38.9 percent to CZK 7.9 billion over the first three quarters of 2020, having made a CZK 15.6 billion operational profit, down 7.3 percent. Operational earnings since the beginning of the year fell 3.3 percent to CZK 31 billion, with earnings from interest down 2 percent to CZK 21.8 billion. This was influenced in part by the state’s order to banks in the Czech Republic to allow borrowers to defer payments for six months. “The results for the first three quarters indicate that companies and households began to recover from the first shock caused by the pandemic and the closing of the economy that followed,” said the bank’s chairman Tomas Salomon. “The overall volume of client loans were 5.4 percent larger at the end of September than in the same period last year.” The bank’s parent company Erste Group Bank managed a profit of €343.3 million in the third quarter of 2020, down from €491.1 million a year before. It has warned that its profits for 2020 will be a significant disappointment. For the first three quarter of the year, its pre-tax profit fell 48 percent to €637.1 million.
