Awash Bank, the first private bank that commenced business after the Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power, has earned a little over 1.4 billion birr gross profit holding its lead among private banks in Ethiopia.
Last year, the bank took the lead from Dashen Bank by surpassing the one billion birr mark. According to sources, the bank has managed to make a gross profit of 1,444,038 birr before tax in the 2016/2017 fiscal year.
This year’s profit is 439.4 million birr more than last year’s, which was a little over one billion birr, cementing the banks position of being on the driver’s seat. Andualem Hailu, director of Marketing and Communications, told The Reporter that “Vision 2020” strategy has played a major role in achieving this success.
The bank started implementing “Vision 2025”, which was designed by KPMG, in the concluded fiscal year. “Our success in the concluded fiscal year proofs that we are on the right track,” he said. “The bank will continue to implement the strategy in the coming ten years and Awash was able to achieve all of the goals for the first financial year of the strategy,” Andualem said.
The paid-up capital of the bank rose to 2.65 billion birr depicting a growth of more than 402 million birr when compared to the same period of last year. The total loans and advances in the concluded financial year reached 22.6 billion birr exceeding last year’s 15.5 billion birr by 7.1 billion birr. In addition, the total deposit including margins climbed to 32.7 billion birr surpassing the last year’s 24.2 billion birr by 8.5 billion birr.
Andualem said that the bank has faced two major challenges during the 2016/2017 financial year. The first one was resource mobilization mainly on deposit and foreign currency mobilization. The bank faced fierce competition from other private banks in resource mobilization. The other challenge was related to the implementation of “Vision 2025” which has caused a massive internal organizational restructuring. Hence, major reshuffling has been undergoing while implementing the strategy starting from the top management. These two challenges were the two major hurdles that the bank was subjected to deal with during the concluded financial year.
Awash Bank’s total assets has reached over 42.2 billion birr. In this category, the bank was able to add over 11.1 billion birr on last year asset.
In addition, the bank’s branch has also mushroomed by opening 73 new branches and the total number of branches reached 313. The total number of employees has also reached 6,783.
