Sberbank (SBER): a breakdown by the numbers

Sberbank cannot be analysed with the same multiples used for a factory or a retailer: a bank has no revenue or EBITDA in the usual sense; it has an interest margin, a cost of risk and capital, which by law constrains everything else, the dividend included. A meaningful analysis therefore runs not from price to earnings but from capital to earnings, and only then to price. For current values, see the SBER card and the issuers' financial statements; what follows is the mechanism that turns those values into a conclusion.

Why a bank's arithmetic is different

At a manufacturing company, revenue comes from sales and debt is a burden. At a bank, the money it borrows is its raw material, and its obligations to depositors are part of the business model, not a sign of being overstretched. Several things follow from this. Leverage expressed as the ratio of debt to EBITDA is simply not calculated for a bank. Profitability is measured not against total assets but against equity: it is capital that limits how many assets the bank is allowed to hold on its balance sheet. And valuation rests on two linked multiples, price to earnings and price to capital, because a bank's profit may turn out to exist only on paper if provisions for bad loans are understated, whereas its capital is real.

Where the profit comes from

The bulk of Sberbank's result is made up of interest income: the difference between what the bank earns on loans and what it pays on deposits and other funding. That difference is the net interest margin. It narrows when the key rate rises sharply: deposits reprice faster than a loan book that was written earlier on the old terms. This is why, in a tightening cycle, the margin usually weighs on a bank's profit with a lag and not straight away.

The second pillar is fee and commission income: payments, acquiring, brokerage and other services. It is less sensitive to the rate and is therefore valued as the more predictable part of the result. When the fee component in a report grows faster than the interest component, that points to resilience, even if the bottom line is flat.

Cost of risk: the variable that breaks the model

Cost of risk is the share of the loan book that the bank has charged to provisions for expected losses over the period. The mechanism is simple and unpleasant: a provision reduces profit today but protects capital tomorrow. A bank that formally looks cheap on earnings may prove expensive if its provisions do not yet reflect a deterioration in the loan book, because the profit of future periods will then go towards covering losses.

Capital as the limit on the dividend

Capital adequacy is a regulatory requirement, not an aspiration. A bank is obliged to hold capital in a set proportion to its risk-weighted assets. From this comes a link that is often overlooked: the dividend is paid not out of profit as such, but out of what is left after the ratio has been maintained and the loan book has grown. A growing loan book consumes capital by itself. That is why high profit and a high dividend are not the same thing at a bank, and the decision of the board of directors may turn out more modest than the income statement would suggest.

Multiples: what exactly to look at

The earnings multiple for the stock is 3,92. It should be read together with the valuation relative to capital: a valuation above capital is justified only by a sustainably high return on that capital, and conversely, a valuation below capital means the market doubts either the quality of the assets or the bank's ability to go on earning such a return.

A useful discipline is to compare with other sectors, where the drivers are different: for commodity issuers they are the price and the exchange rate, for retail they are turnover and margin. Look at how the same multiples behave in the Gazprom breakdown and the Ozon breakdown; the contrast shows how much of a valuation is set by the sector and not by the company.

Dividend and tax

Dates, amounts and record dates are in the dividend calendar and in the general section on dividends. Upcoming payments:

Under the bank's dividend policy, the payout per preferred share and per ordinary share is the same, so the difference between the two securities comes down to price and voting rights, not to the size of the payout. The tax base for dividends is determined by the rule 13%; the deduction on an individual investment account does not extend to dividends, which is a frequent mistake when calculating expected return.

The order of analysis

Step 1: look at how the interest and fee components have moved in the financial statements. Step 2: find the cost of risk and compare it with the previous period. Step 3: check capital adequacy. Step 4: only now open the multiples in the SBER card. Step 5: check the dates of meetings and publications in the events calendar, so as not to make a decision on the eve of a report.

What is not here

This breakdown describes the mechanism for reading the figures, but it contains no forecast of the margin, of provisions or of the future dividend: the platform's database holds no such data, and deriving them from past values would be guesswork. The terms used above are explained in the glossary.