We hereby officially announce 2016 Annual Report: Fortitude is published. This year the topic of the issue is fortitude — due to ever-tighter regulation, and countless inspections by regulators and auditors, which the bank passed all well.

In June, on the global stock market, a typical consolidation stage was observed, which was slowly entered by the markets as early as in May. Leading topic for investors both within certain markets and in global scale was rotation which resulted in multidirectional movement among key stock indices and among sectors and industries.

The traditional saying “Sell in May and go away” did not quite work this year, and May has become another positive month for global stock markets. Moreover, the usual nervousness and increased volatility often observed in May were missing too. On the contrary, VIX index, which reflects stock market volatility expectations, fell down to the lowest point since 1993. News background was rather empty creating an impression of that the market was moving habitually slowly entering consolidation stage.

ABLV Bank, AS performance in Q1 2017 enables it to predict that the aims set forth for this year will be reached. All significant indicators of the bank’s operation remain high, including capital adequacy and liquidity indicators.

Another issue of ABLV Bank shares has been successfully completed, under which there were 3 780 000 registered shares issued. Following this, the bank’s share capital is comprised of 38 250 000 ordinary voting shares and 3 830 000 employee shares without voting rights attached. The newly issued shares constitute 9.9% of the bank’s voting share capital.

In April, given the absence of any news or events capable of affecting the moods of the investors, the global stock market entered the stage of consolidation after a rather strong growth in Q1 of this year. Corporate earnings reports mostly met investor expectations; macroeconomic data had no surprises as well, so the attention of the market participants was focused on the political background in Europe.

In March, the global stock market retained positive moods, yet investors have become more selective, while the stock markets of various states and regions have lost their lockstep. If those were American stock indices that set the tone in February, then in March the European markets took over the lead. STOXX Europe 600 index grew by 2.94% within a month, while American S&P 500 stayed where it was, and the Japanese market lost more than 1%.

ABLV Bank Council and Board approved the bank’s and the group’s audited report for 2016. The bank gained profit of EUR 79.3 million in 2016.

In February, optimism continued to prevail on global stock market. As before, the US capital market indexes set the tone for positive moods, achieving new records day after day. It should be noted that investors had enough reasons for such optimism, since earnings season turned out to be rather good. As at the end of February, reports were published by approximately 90% of the companies, and 74% of those managed to surpass the analysts’ profit estimates, as the overall profit growth constituted 5%.

Although last financial year can be said to be full of surprises, price fluctuations that were hard to explain, and historic turns, as well as the overall economic growth slowed down, ABLV Bank managed to achieve and surpass the planned results, gaining the historically highest profit so far.