Sberbank Eyes a Second Straight Record: Trillion-Rouble H1 Profit and a 50% Dividend Pledge

Sberbank (MOEX: SBER), Russia's largest lender by assets, deposits and household loans, expects to earn more in 2026 than in the record year of 2025 and to hand half of that profit to shareholders, chief executive Herman Gref said on September 3, 2026, at the Eastern Economic Forum. The bank keeps its promise of a 50% payout of IFRS net profit despite what Gref called a "fairly difficult situation" for the economy.

A trillion-rouble first half

The forum remarks rest on strong interim numbers. In the first half of 2026 Sberbank's IFRS net profit rose 18.6% year on year to 1.019 trillion roubles, according to the group's report published in late July. The second quarter alone brought 511.2 billion roubles of profit, up 20.9%, with return on equity at 24%. Net interest income for the six months grew 22.5% to 2.05 trillion roubles, and net fee income added 5.4% to 419.8 billion roubles.

• Loan portfolio: up 3.9% in real terms since the start of the year, to 52.6 trillion roubles — corporate lending +2.9%, retail lending +5.6%.
• Private client funds: up 3% excluding currency revaluation, to 34.5 trillion roubles; Sberbank's share of household lending passed 50%, and of attracted retail funds reached 45%.
• Russian accounting standards (RAS) net profit for January–June: up 20.4% year on year, to 995.3 billion roubles.

The dividend math behind the record

In late June shareholders approved the distribution for 2025: 37.64 roubles per ordinary and preferred share, or 850.2 billion roubles in total — exactly half of the more than 1.7 trillion roubles of IFRS net profit earned last year, as the bank's materials show. To qualify, investors had to hold the shares through July 20, 2026; at approval the paper offered a dividend yield of about 12%.

A year earlier the payout was 786.9 billion roubles, or 34.84 roubles per share, at a yield of roughly 11% — so the 2025 distribution grew by about 8% per share, and the 2026 ambition is to beat that record again.

Reserves for marketplaces and a 22% ROE floor

The main threat to the record is provisioning: Sberbank has been building reserves against loans to marketplaces. Even so, Gref argued the group can still post record profit, promising investors return on equity of no less than 22% and repeating that the bank "hopes to receive record profits and pay record dividends at the level of 50%", with his customary caveat that this is a plan, not guidance, as reported on September 3.

For holders of SBER shares the arithmetic is transparent: the payout ratio converts each rouble of IFRS profit into 50 kopecks of dividends, which is why the quarterly ROE figure matters to the market as much as the reserves themselves.