Bank Leumi issued a profit warning for the first quarter

Bank Leumi issued a profit warning for the first quarter of this year. According to the Bank's announcement that, under the management of Hanan Friedman, the crisis in the capital markets in Israel and the world, following the spread of the Corona virus, resulted in, among other things, that the Bank is expected to report a net loss attributable to shareholders of the estimated value of NIS 200 million to 300 million in the first quarter NIS.
Bank Hapoalim also reported an injury from the Corona crisis last week. Thus, in the first quarter reports, the bank reported a jump in expenses for credit losses, nostro losses and a fall in profitability due to the Corona crisis. Bank Hapoalim posted a 77% drop in net profit in the quarter, reflecting a return on equity of only 2%.
Bank Leumi is expected to show much weaker results, in part, because the workers were the last of the banks to publish their results last year, and therefore already made considerable provisions in the fourth quarter last year for the Corona crisis.
Considering the results for the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, the workers presented due to the Corona crisis, and so far, a sharp increase of NIS 1.43 billion in credit loss expenses. It is inevitable that Leumi will present the order of many hundreds of millions of shekels in this section in summarizing its results for the first quarter of this year. Leumi is likely to have very substantial discharges, especially group discharges, due to the overall deterioration in the economy.
However, Leumi notes, together with the profit warning, that "after the balance sheet date, there were increases in the capital markets that significantly offset the losses recorded in securities in the first quarter of the year."