Ceska sporitelna (CS), Erste Bank’s 98%-owned Czech subsidiary, holds an EGM today where shareholders are expected to approve the sale of CS’s non-life insurance business, Pojistovna CS, to Kooperativa, Wiener Stadtische's Czech insurance subsidiary. Erste seeks to optimize its group structure so that its insurance assets will focus exclusively on life insurance. The selling price has been set at approximately CZK 4.1bn. Pojistovna CS has a 5.5% market share of the domestic non-life insurance market. Note that CS rival Komercni banka recently sold most of its non-life insurance business, which had accounted for 2.1% of the market, for approx. CZK 0.4bn; therefore, we consider the selling price as rather favorable to CS.
Jan Hájek