Third Record in a Row: Sber's 2025 AGM and Annual Report Review

A Meeting Where the Future Was Discussed More Than the Results

Formally, the annual meeting on June 30 was routine: for the first time held in a fully remote format, with absentee voting. Shareholders approved the annual report for 2025 and elected a new supervisory board of 14 members, half of whom are independent directors. The main item on the agenda was record dividends, which we'll return to separately.

The second part proved far more substantive—German Gref's responses to shareholder questions. The conversation quickly moved beyond banking reports to the state of the entire economy, and it was these statements that became the day's main news.

Gref's central thesis: extensive growth has been exhausted. Capacity utilization in the country, according to him, has reached its limit, and output can no longer be increased the old way. He illustrated productivity with an old joke about a dairy herd—you can milk a cow five times a day, but that won't make her produce more milk.

The second theme concerned monetary policy. Gref called the economy overheated and considers the key rate still high, even after the Central Bank lowered it for the ninth consecutive time in June, to 14.25% per annum. Under current conditions, he added, the planning horizon is approaching zero, and companies have to operate in a regime of high uncertainty.

Behind the Record—A Steady Trajectory, Not a Surge

Net profit of Sber under IFRS for 2025 amounted to 1.705 trillion rubles—7.9% more than a year earlier. This is the third consecutive record, and what matters here is not so much the figure itself as the trajectory. After the collapse of 2022, when profit shrank to 270.5 billion rubles, the bank recovered to 1.5 trillion in 2023 and has now consolidated above 1.7 trillion. Growth is slowing in pace but proceeding steadily, without surges or pullbacks.

The main engine remained the interest business. Net interest income grew 18.5% to reach 3.56 trillion rubles, while net interest margin (NIM) held steady at 6.2%. Put simply, the bank earned well on the spread between what it receives on loans and what it pays for attracted funds, and the high key rate didn't narrow this spread but actually widened it.

Two items weighed on results. Net fee and commission income declined 1.1% to 842.9 billion rubles, but this reflects a high base effect from 2024 rather than falling demand for services. More significant are the reserves: provisions expenses grew nearly one and a half times to 413 billion rubles, with a cost of risk at 1.3%. The bank deliberately hedged against a more challenging macro environment. Meanwhile, the cost-to-income ratio remained at 30.3%—the same as a year ago, and AI implementation helped maintain it at that level.

Profitability dipped slightly—and it's not about deteriorating performance

One metric in the report declined, and it's worth explaining separately, because this is precisely what banks use to compare themselves against each other. Return on equity (ROE) for the year came in at 22.7% versus 24.0% in 2024.

ROE shows how much profit a bank squeezes out of every ruble of equity capital—that is, shareholders' money, not deposits raised from customers. For a bank, this is the key measure of efficiency: you can grow assets and profit in absolute terms, but if capital swells faster in the process, the return on it falls. That's why investors look not only at the mass of profit, but also at ROE.

High rates hit the portfolio unevenly

The most interesting aspect of Sberbank's results is how expensive money affected different parts of the loan portfolio in different ways. Corporate loans increased 12.4% to reach 31.16 trillion rubles: businesses continued taking out investment credits. Retail lending grew more modestly, up 6% to 19.2 trillion rubles, and within that segment the picture was reversed.

Mortgages grew 11.6% to 12.5 trillion rubles, with Sber's market share rising to 57%. This was supported by preferential programs, primarily family mortgages, which partially offset the impact of high rates for borrowers. Consumer loans, by contrast, contracted 12.6% to 3.5 trillion rubles: people logically stopped taking out expensive credit for current expenses.

The same rate also transformed liabilities. Household deposits in accounts and deposits grew 20.3% to reach 33.47 trillion rubles—with high deposit yields, saving became more attractive than spending or borrowing. Corporate client funds, by contrast, fell 5.3% to 15.91 trillion rubles. In other words, over the year the bank significantly loaded up on retail deposits—a stable but expensive funding base.

Dividends that immediately become budget revenue

The record profit turned into a record payout. Shareholders approved 850.2 billion rubles in dividends, or 37.64 rubles per share—for both common and preferred shares. That's half of net profit under IFRS and a new all-time high: a year earlier the payout was 34.84 rubles (786.9 billion rubles), and back in 2022 it was just 25 rubles.

These payments have another side that matters for the broader economy. The government owns 50% plus one share of Sber, meaning more than 425 billion rubles in dividends will flow directly into the federal budget to finance state programs. 

The pool of recipients has also expanded. Dividends will go to more than 2.4 million shareholders — their number has grown by nearly 600,000 over the year. The record date has been set for July 20, 2026.

A year lived under the sign of artificial intelligence

If you had to sum up all of 2025 in one theme, it would be AI. The bank's proprietary model GigaChat is developing rapidly. More than 20 million people use it monthly, while over 900 AI agents operate within Sber itself. The technology has directly impacted headcount: in 2025 the bank cut roughly 20% of personnel, and the number of certain management positions in the regional network decreased by 65%. This is precisely what kept costs in check, as discussed above.

Going forward, Sber intends to invest even more aggressively. Around 350 billion rubles has been earmarked for generative AI development in 2026, the bank has assembled a lineup of anthropomorphic robots led by Grin, its first humanoid robot, and is building infrastructure around AI agents. According to Gref's assessment, voiced back at SPIEF, Russia ranks among the top five leaders in AI and lags behind China by six to eight months, with the main reason for the gap being a shortage of computing power, not ideas.