National Bank of Greece S.A

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Yota Yokoro's call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the National Bank of Greece conference call to present and discuss the full year 2024 financial results. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Pavlos Milonas, CEO of National Bank of Greece. Mr. Milonas, you may now proceed.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter 2024 financial results call. I'm joined by Christos Christodoulou, Group CFO, Greg Papagrigoris, Group Head of IR. After my introductory remarks, Christos will go into more detail on our financial performance, and then we'll turn to Q&A. So let's begin. Before I turn to our full year 2024 financial results, I will begin with a brief overview of Greece's economic environment, the positive backdrop to our robust financial performance. It is important to understand that one, strong fundamentals and two, improved competitors build up over many years of reforms are the main reasons why economic activity in Greece remains remarkably resilient to external headwinds from a stagnant Europe. There are not many countries in Europe that possess these strong comparative advantages. Households and corporates have both been key drivers for GDP growth of nearly 2.5% in 2024. Turning to households, labor market conditions remain strong with a steadily declining unemployment rate currently near 9% and at a 15-year low. Moreover, combined with positive wage adjustments of 4% so far in 2024, higher real disposable income is providing additional confidence to households. Looking forward, further increases in household income combined with strong wealth effects arising from the housing and stock market should sustain private consumption as well as demand for housing. As regards corporate, activity remains solid with business investment at an all-time high. The drivers behind this performance comprise high capacity utilization rates and strong corporate profitability. Indeed, gross fixed capital formation is currently at a 16-year high which led the impressive pickup in corporate credit expansion in 2024, about 14% year-on-year. Surging M&A activity and a rebound in inward foreign direct investment to the second highest level on record, an amount of $6 billion in 2024, highlight the dynamism of the corporate sector. An additional boost comes from the increasing absorption of RRF funds, about 50% from a total of $36 billion, with accelerating disbursements to the real economy in the second half of 2024, about $8 billion. More than $25 billion of RF-related financial spending is expected in the next two years, 2025 and 2026. The external sector has also supported growth. Indeed, tourism had another strong year, and towards the end of the past year, the end of 2024, goods exports showed signs of strengthening, which is very encouraging. last point on the economy household as well as corporate loan demand should receive a positive boost from the significant ongoing relaxation of monetary conditions now let me turn to our financial results our full year 2024 performance showed a remarkable strength across all business lines leveraging on a positive economic environment as just described our inherent comparative advantages reflected a well-capitalized and liquid balance sheet, and our successful operational transformation, including our early and significant investment in technology and digital. Indeed, even following positive revisions to our guidance in August, we exceeded these revised full-year 2024 targets across all metrics. Specifically, our full-year 2024 core PATS reached 1.3 billion, up 10% year-on-year, delivering a core return on tangible equity of 17.5%, well above our full-year guidance of over 16%. While this return increases to nearly 22%, adjusted for our capital buffers. From an earnings-per-share perspective, we have produced an earnings-per-share of Euros 1.4, again significantly higher than guidance, and up from an EPS of 1.2 euros in 2023 and half a euro in 2022. The key contributor to the 2024 performance has been the resilience of our NII in NIM to normalizing rates. This was mostly due to the impressive net expansion of our performing loan book up 3.1 billion, 10% year-on-year, double the positively revised guidance of August 2024. Even though this result was driven by sharp pickup in corporate disbursements,

Ladies and gentlemen, apologies for the short interruption. The management is back with us.