KB shareholders OK pre-tax dividend payment of Kc60.42 per share

Prague, April 20 (CTK) - Komercni banka (KB) shareholders approved the board's proposal to pay out a dividend worth Kc60.42 per share before tax from 2022's profit of Kc17.6bn, the bank told CTK today.

Out of the bank‘s Kc17.6bn profit, Kc11.5bn will be distributed among shareholders, and Kc6.1bn will go to retained earnings from previous years, the annual general meeting (AGM) decided.

Shareholders who own the bank's shares as of May 2 will be entitled to the dividend, payable on May 22, 2023.

"This is the biggest regular dividend paid since 2016," XTB analyst Tomas Cverna told CTK.

The dividend yield at today's share price is 8 percent, higher than the 6 percent proposed by Austria's Erste. Moneta is proposing a dividend yield of 9.5 percent. KB shares reacted with a slight rise of 0.07 percent during today's session, having added 0.7 percent since the start of the week. More volatility in the stock is expected right before the record date of May 2.

KB's net profit rose by 37.9 percent yr/yr to Kc17.6bn in 2022. The proposed dividend is thus 65 percent of last year's net profit, which corresponds to KB's standard dividend policy, under which the bank pays out 60 to 70 percent of its annual net profit.

At the end of 2021, KB's general meeting decided to pay a dividend of Kc23.86 per share from retained earnings for 2019 and 2020. Last April, shareholders approved a dividend of Kc43.80 per share from the 2021 earnings. In November, they approved an additional dividend of Kc55.50 per share from retained earnings to make up for the period when dividend payments were restricted by a COVID-19-related regulation.

KB has over 69,000 shareholders, most of them individuals from the Czech Republic. The majority shareholder is the French bank Societe Generale with a 60.4 percent stake.

The AGM also elected Marie Doucetova as a new member of the supervisory board and re-elected Petra Wendelova as a member of the supervisory board and a member of the audit committee.

Before the start of the AGM, about a dozen activists protested by dancing and singing against the bank's financing of Czech entrepreneur Daniel Kretinsky's energy and industry group Energeticky a prumyslovy holding (EPH).

According to Radek Kubala of the Re:set platform, 500 people have already contacted KB management, demanding an end to the cooperation with Kretinsky because of the harmful impact of his business.

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