UniCredit, Italy's biggest bank by assets, is sticking to its full-year net profit target of 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) despite a worsening economic outlook for its Italian home base, its chief executive said on Saturday. Italian gross domestic product contracted 0.2 percent in the second quarter as a fall in investments dragged the country back into recession, according to the latest in a recent string of grim numbers for the eurozone's third-largest economy.
UniCredit CEO Federico Ghizzoni said the bank's business plan unveiled earlier this year was based on conservative estimates for Italy's economy, adding the worse-than-expected data would not make much of a difference for the bank's targets. "We were expecting better (economic) numbers for 2014, but compared to our forecasts it's not so different," Ghizzoni told Reuters in an interview, adding the bank had pencilled in a forecast of 0.4-0.5 percent growth this year. "So if it's 0.2-0.3 percent the impact is not too much this year, so I am still confident about our numbers," he said.
UniCredit posted a net profit of 1.1 billion euros in the first half of the year. Ghizzoni said his bank was confident about the upcoming results of a Europe-wide health check of lenders, and did not see a "systemic problem" for Italian lenders as a whole. "For us, we are confident that we have done a lot of restructuring in the past, so we are looking to the test in a very confident way," he said.
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