Recent end-of-year profit statements from Turkish banks revealed that unlike much of the world, banks performed quite well in the face of adversity.
State-owned Ziraat Bankası posted the highest profit in 2009 in the Turkish banking sector with a record TL 3.5 billion in profit. Garanti Bankası came in second with TL 3.1 billion, a more than 70 percent increase over 2008. Garanti’s 2009 profit was more than four times as high as that of 2005, while Ziraat, İş Bankası, and Akbank enjoyed profits twice as high. Halkbank increased its profits threefold in the same time span.
The entire banking sector’s total profit in 2005 was TL 5 billion. The number slowly grew in the following years and is expected to be higher than TL 20 billion for last year. Halkbank General Manager Hüseyin Aydın, speaking to the Anatolia news agency, stated that the great gains witnessed in the Turkish stock market boosted the profitability of bank portfolios, leading to healthy profits. Regarding profits in 2010, he signaled that profits like those seen in 2009 will be hard to reach. “There will, of course, be profits,” he added, “but not like those in 2009. The interest rate margins will shrink and competition will increase, so profits will take some hits.”
