CFO Bettina Orlopp told the Financial Times that management will certainly think about it as soon as it becomes clear what the half-year results look like. This would be “significantly larger” than the first with a volume of 122 million euros, which is currently underway and should be completed by the end of July.
Further buybacks make sense because Commerzbank shares, which are currently trading at less than half of book value, are massively undervalued, Orlopp added in an interview with the newspaper. She did not name a specific volume, but she signaled that it would be over 200 million euros and below the upper limit of 1 billion euros. When presenting the figures for the first quarter, Orlopp had already said that Commerzbank’s scope for distributing capital to shareholders had increased.
The greatest uncertainty for the half-year results, which the bank will present on August 4th, is the mortgage portfolio of the Polish subsidiary M-Bank, according to the CFO in the FT. Legal disputes are currently ongoing in Poland against several banks over index clauses in loan agreements in Swiss francs. A final judgment or an industry-wide comparison is still pending. In this context, Commerzbank repeatedly had to make provisions, which weighed on the result.
In XETRA trading, the Commerzbank share temporarily rose by 0.46 percent to EUR 9.96.
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