Good afternoon, dear shareholders, investors, analysts, journalists, and listeners. Welcome to Šiaulių Bankas Investor Conference to introduce financial results for the most recent Q4, as well as for the whole year, 2023, and recent developments of Šiaulių Bankas. I am Simona from Nasdaq Vilnius, and I'll be moderating today's event. We will start with a presentation from Šiaulių Bankas team, which I will introduce shortly, and after the presentation, we will open Q&A session. Please be informed that this webinar is being recorded and will be available for a re-watch at Šiaulių Bankas website and on the Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. As always, I encourage every one of you to share your questions throughout the whole webinar session, using the Q&A session on the right-hand side of your screen.
With that said, I am pleased to introduce today's hosts, Tomas Varenbergas, the Head of Investment Management Division, Indrė Genytė-Pikčienė, the Chief Economist, and Donatas Savickas, the Chief Financial Officer. Dear presenters, we look forward to hearing from you with a great interest. Please, the floor is yours.
Good afternoon. On behalf of Šiaulių Bankas, I would like to express a warm welcome to all our investors, analysts, participants for joining us today for this important investor webinar. We appreciate your time and interest in Šiaulių Bankas, and we're excited to share our insights about our recent performance. To begin, we have just concluded an exceptional year, and our revenue growth has been impressive, driven by expansion of both net interest income and net fee and commissions. This underlines our ability to generate value across various sides of our business. We have reached substantial growth in both our loan portfolio and local deposits base. Actually, this is not only that reflects our trust of our clients, but also signifies our commitment to promoting the local economy.
Our commitment to strict expense discipline remains firm, even as we growth-oriented, we are mindful on control. Last year, we have achieved a record high net profit. This milestone reflects the effectiveness of our strategic decisions and the right course of our business. Our capital generation has been strong and I am pleased to share that the management board intends to propose a record high dividends per share, which represents a substantial payout of up to 43%, and that underlines our commitment to delivering shareholder value. To move on, since last our meeting, there are some major developments or achievements in the bank.
So first of all, again, we completed the merger of retail business, and that emphasize our ability not only to grow for business organically, but to successfully implement M&A transactions. And we do believe that the last transaction will deliver both revenue and operational synergies going forward. We have announced our new strategy in the beginning of the year. We have a big ambition to be the best bank in Lithuania, 2029. And well, that strategy involves a range of value-driven initiatives, including rebranding, significant IT investments, and new organizational structure. In January, we have executed our share buyback program. So that was the inaugural, the first one.
We have implemented it successfully and, looking to the current, valuation that the stock is trading, the management thinks that it's cheap stock. And, going forward, we believe that, this instrument, should be and, will be used, at larger scale, pretty soon. We committed ourselves to net zero target in 2050. The bank joined Science Based Targets initiative, and, well, that sets the short-term science-based targets and which are aligned with, Paris Agreement, goals. And last but not the least, the bank was recognized as the best customer servicing bank in the country, and, well, that emphasize our commitment to deliver, the best, customer, servicing, services for our clients.
Before going to more details about our financial performance, we are ready to discuss the latest macro developments, and I will pass a word to Indrė Genytė-Pikčienė, our Chief Economist, to lead this section.
Thanks, Tomas. Hello, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's an honor and a privilege to be here to join my colleagues in this quarterly meeting investors event. I sincerely hope that my views and insights will be valuable to you and set the proper macroeconomic stage for all the topics we've prepared for you today. Let me start with the major categories. Recent dynamics of Lithuanian economy in terms of GDP and the major drivers of the country's economic growth. Actually, we should admit that the recent situation, recent years were pretty challenging for all the Baltic economies, including ours, because of the series of non-economic nature shocks and challenges they had to go through. First of all, our region was hit by the pandemic.
Later, the trailing along inflation shock, which was even fueled more by the energy crisis, served for the Europe by Russia. And later, we had had faced the Russian invasion against Ukraine and the spillover effects on our economies. And actually, looking backwards, we can see that Lithuanian economy managed to navigate through this challenging chapter pretty smoothly. It even managed to avoid a recession in 2020, and afterwards experienced a pretty sound recovery and growth, balanced growth. And it was two years in 2021 and in 2022, when Lithuanian economy gathered strength or accumulated sound reserves.
And that helped to prepare for the challenges we faced last year, when the economies of our region and the whole global economy was hit by both cyclical challenges as well as geoeconomic challenges, given the deepening fractures between Eastern and Western, between democratic and undemocratic blocks of the global economies. So last year, Lithuanian economies slipped into the shallow recession of 0.3%, and that was the result of several reasons. First of all, as I mentioned, we had a significant base effect given the sound growth in 2022. And it was really hard to surpass or to take over these results.
Last year, when the effects of weakness of our exports markets have kicked in, as well as the geopolitical effects also trailed along. Looking to the dynamics of the major growth drivers, you can see that, all except one, we are underperforming last year. Domestic consumption of households, together with the external drivers, were in the red territory, but fixed capital formation was the pillar which proceeded growing pretty rapidly last year and managed to compensate part of the losses experienced by cyclically affected sectors. The main reason behind this growth of investments was the public investments, EU structural funds, which were redirected to energy infrastructure and civil engineering structures and constructions.
And that helped the construction sector to perform positively, despite the private appetite for investments have been diminishing rapidly. Let's now look to the industry, industrial sector, manufacturing, which is the core pillar of Lithuanian externally oriented growth model. And actually, we should admit that last year was pretty challenging for this, our major growth driver, for the sector, which entails and triggers off the longest value chains within the economy. However, some of this negative performance is also a result of the base effect, which was given the sound double-digit growth seen in 2021 and 2022....
After such a golden chapter for our exporters, who managed to, well, to feed from the logistics chain disruptions after the COVID and take over the contracts which were dedicated for the Far East. Actually, last year was the year of some rebalancing phase, of some stop and check for competitiveness. Hopefully, the situation will improve this year after the external demand will revive in the second half of the year.
Because as we can see from the sentiment indicators in the middle and on the right-hand side of the diagram, it is obvious that the worst situation is already in the past, given that the hump of inventory is decreasing and the appetite of our manufacturing companies for the employment is growing once again. That's good. Another thing which is also assuring for the improving future is the situation of our labor market, which remains pretty dynamic despite the cyclical challenges our economies go through. As you can see from the diagram on the left-hand side, you can see that the employment has been growing pretty fastly in recent years.
Actually last year, the number of the employed was the highest in more than 15 years, given the high numbers of immigrants coming to Lithuania to work. But the tense situation of Lithuanian labor market and the structural challenges of Lithuanian labor market helped to absorb this additional labor last year, and the unemployment rate remains pretty sound at the pretty sound levels. It also reflects that our businesses don't want to change their capacities and try to sustain the levels of labor and capital and want to be prepared for the moment when the recovery cycle of Western markets will kick in.
And hopefully, they will manage to do that, because during these couple of years, when the exports have been booming and the inflation brought additional revenues for the businesses, they managed to accumulate sound reserves, and they will help to improve the room for maneuver in the pretty tense waters we're experiencing at the moment and we will experience in the first quarter of this year. The average monthly wages proceed growing, first of all, fueled by the decisions taken by our government, serious decisions to increase wages in the public sector, together with decisions to increase minimum monthly wage, fueled growth of wages.
Last year, we fixed, we registered the growth of average monthly wages at 12%. This year, we expect that this trend will proceed further, but at a bit weaker pace of 7%. That will help our households to recover what purchasing power losses, which were well trailing along after the inflation shock Lithuania experienced in 2022. As you can see, the inflation numbers have been improving pretty rapidly. Lithuania stood out as a country registering the highest inflation, one of the highest inflation numbers in 2022.
And now, the situation is radically different because the annual change in Harmonized Consumer Price Index stands at 1.1%. And, in second half of last year, Lithuania have experienced several months of monthly deflation. So that is the good news for our consumers, and the purchasing power should recover all the losses shortly. And, actually, we can all see the resilience of our consumption pillar of growth from the second diagram in this slide. Because despite the inflation shock, despite the geopolitical uncertainty and other challenges our households had to go through, the deflated retail trades turnover volumes are still significantly higher than we registered before the pandemic. So, the resilience of our households are still intact.
Hopefully, this year, well, keeping in mind that the wages will proceed growing and that inflation is retreating, this trend will strengthen even further. Looking to the dynamics of our credit market, we also see that the situation is much better in comparison to the average numbers registered in the EU, because, for example, the loans granted to house, the outstanding amounts of loans granted to households have been growing by around six, more than 6%. And in the EU, on average, the loan portfolio has increased by only 0.3% at the end of 2023. And this growth is the worst in nine years.
So, our current market remains pretty dynamic despite the restrictive and hawkish monetary policy measures have been introduced. And the room for our households and non-financial corporations is also for financial maneuver, is also strengthened by that the debt levels is still among the lowest in the European Union. So that's not a surprise that, keeping in mind all the strengths of labor market, also the accumulated financial reserves, that the sentiments in Lithuania are among the best in the EU. And it also strengthens our view that domestic consumption will be one of the strongest pillars for the recovery this year.
I would like to conclude my part with a short peek to the short-term forecasts for Lithuanian economy. For this year, we expect that Lithuanian economy will enter the recovery phase. It will grow by 1.8%, and it's still below Lithuania's recent potential growth rate, because we don't expect a fast rebound in the first half of the year. The strengthening of the economy will happen in the second half of the year after the Western markets will recover and will be fueled by the easing monetary policy.
And we hope that the dominating soft landing scenario will come through and will help our externally oriented economy to enter the recovery phase after this short slump into the negatives. So thanks for your attention. The virtual floor is yours, Tomas.
Thank you, Indrė. It's actually a very extensive review of macro trends. So let's continue our webinar with our overview of financial performance. So we have achieved record revenue with actually notable net interest income growth, which arise from expanding loan portfolio and higher base rates. Our net fee and commission incomes grew almost double digit. And we do see that with our revenue line will expect it to increase substantially in the future due to the completion of in retail merger. Actually, some of that impact already seen in our Q4 performance. Despite facing inflationary pressures and non-recurring expenses, our operating profit surge were impressive 30% year-on-year.
Well, our cost to income demonstrated actually improvement during the last year. Increased impairments actually attributed to our prudent risk management and revised parameters. Actually, our specific borrower's financial situation is good. In a significant milestone, we have achieved a record net profit of EUR 75.4 million. Well, notably, that excluding the one-offs, the profit should be in the area of EUR 81 million, and our return on equity would exceed 16.5%. That underlines our business strengths. Loan portfolio growth was mainly financed by our local depositors. Worth to mention that we have substantial increase in our clients under management and under custody.
So clients' assets under management increased due to, again, our retail business merger. Currently, these assets are more than EUR 1.5 billion. Assets under custody as well doubled, more than doubled during the last year. Well, that emphasizes our clients' trust in us. Let's look on how this all these financial numbers transforms into the KPIs, and we do see that our financial targets we largely met. Of course, we were impacted by some one-offs. These one-offs will be aggregated more on our operating expenses section. But just to put a note that excluding these one-offs, we are above our initial guidance and even above our revised guidance.
But as we are taking, these are one-offs, so yes, so we are close, but below our revised guidance on Return on Equity and Cost to Income Ratio. But again, without you know, one-offs or even by taking them, we have concluded an exceptional year. Digging into the loan portfolio performance, we do see that loan portfolio continued to grow across all the key segments, including corporate, mortgage, consumer or renovation financing segments, and we expanded at very fast pace. Yes, should be noted that during the last quarter or towards to the end of the year, the growth flattened, and the Q4 loan growth rate is just below 1.5%, but still the loan portfolio growth is above 10% for the last year.
The yield, the portfolio loan yield growth flattened in the second half of the year. Well, the key reason behind this, I would say, are two. The first one is that the base rate changed its dynamics, and the second one is that the loan portfolio structure becomes more and more diversified, and mortgage, you know, renovation loans makes up a bigger part of our loan book. Looking to our market share dynamics, the performance, again, the very exceptional performance again, results in our increase in the market share. And according to the Q3 data, it increased by 30 basis points, and it's above 10%. Cost of funding is an important part looking to our net-net interest income generation capabilities.
On that part, I would emphasize that our deposits portfolio stickiness increased, or even all the funding structure stickiness increased during the last year. Of course, we have faced a big, big movement of client funds from the current accounts to term deposits accounts. Of course, that it influences our cost of funding and it increased throughout the year. Well, our strong growth of deposits decreased our loan-to-deposit ratio during the last year and at the end of the year, it stood below 93%. Worth to mention that we are going forward to diversifying our funding structure and we completed the second capital markets transaction in Q4.
We issued EUR 50 million of senior unsecured bonds, and going forward, going to 2024, we're planning to be again active in the capital markets. So just to make some conclusions on net interest income from some insights on loan book development and deposits portfolio, funding portfolio development. Well, we do have a strong net interest income growth that was almost 50% in 2023. And well, actually, the net interest income margin growth was due to our good performance on loan portfolio. Well, of course, that was partially offset, and it was partly offset by increasing funding costs. So looking forward, we see, I would say, two challenging challenges.
So the first one is to, you know, to keep our cost of funding growth, you know, balanced and more and more flattening... and to keep working on our loan portfolio growth, diversified loan portfolio growth. Going to the net fee and commission income part, well, we do have a solid Q4. And it's more than 20% better result than we had in 2022 Q4. Partly it's driven by the retail business that was concluded, the transaction that was concluded in December. So that had a positive effect on the whole quarter result.
Nevertheless, we do see increasing diversification in our net fee and commission income structure. Slightly decreasing daily banking fees are being compensated by increasing our revenues from the capital markets products, and after the merger of retail business by even bigger palette or our offering for the retail clients for the savings and investments needs. Worth to mention that the fees that comes from our SB Modernization Fund is also increasing, and I'm pleased to say that we are close to launching our second modernization fund. That will keep fee and commission income growing going forward. Already mentioned that the bank was recognized for services on providing or serving the clients.
The bank was named and recognized as the best bank in Lithuania last year by Dive Lietuva. At this point, I will pass a word to Donatas Savickas, our CFO, in order to make some conclusions on other topics in our investor webinar.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Tomas talked about exciting things, and I will start my part of presentation, talking about not such exciting, but still very important part, operating expenses. Because without investing into the systems, into the people, we cannot reach sustainable targets that we are trying to achieve. And the fourth quarter was notable from the negative side because expenses were increasing significantly comparing to fourth quarter of 2022. And among the main reasons, we could distinguish two parts. One is caused by merger of two companies. Since December 1, we have increase in staff, in systems and also that affect our operating expenses quite significantly.
Of course, at the same time, we enjoy the positive impact to our commission and key income, and we see this as a huge potential to have positive impact to our net result in the coming quarters and years. Also in fourth quarter, we faced some one-off expenses. On this slide, there are mentioned three main ones. So one is that non-recurring expenses in relation with this merger with Invalda Retail, and that could be, how to say, separated in two parts. One is that related with insurance company, that actually, we merged two insurance companies, previous one that we have in Šiaulių Bankas group, and they merged with INVL Life. And after merger, models used in the insurance subsidiary were streamlined in order to have one system.
These models were streamlined in that way that we used by conservative approach and putting some negative impact in this quarter and having more, how to say, room for coming quarters. Because this is the very important new impact of introduced IFRS 17 standard that came in force in this year. And also another part for this non-recurring expenses was that the project of merger itself was, how to say, important in bank history and a lot of this negative impact was recorded in the first quarter. In total, with these two factors, insurance and the project itself, gave EUR 4.4 million in the first quarter.
Second, the windfall tax reallocation that, previously in quarterly reports, we shown this kind of expenses in profit and loss statement in the profit tax line, and according to recommendations of our auditors, we reallocated to operating expenses, and that gave close to EUR 2 million negative impact. The third, simple technical thing, that we increase minimal value for property, plant, and equipment recognition. Used to be EUR 350 , now the bank growing, and we focusing to more important and significant things, that we increase this up to EUR 1,000 , and that gave one-off impact of EUR 0.4-0.5 million , but in the future, it will be less a burden to our depreciation and amortization costs.
All together, these three factors had EUR 6.6 million negative impact. And of course, the bank is growing. We invest more and more in systems, and not only first quarter was affected, but when we compare previous year, whole year with this this year, so we see increase in both salary expenses and other operating expenses, and it totals also is 28%. And probably it's not exceptional year, so the expenses will grow in the future as well, but of course, it's important, as I mentioned in the beginning, to have outweighed by the income lines and commissions mainly. Moving forward, in order to leave some room time for Q&A session, which is going on, so I will move on.
Well, sorry, not very excellent. Sorry. Loan portfolio quality. Again, negative impact in first quarter due to the, I would say, mainly models driven, because bank uses, I would say, conservative approach in models that estimate expected credit losses. And, in fourth quarter, after updating parameters that we took from the Bank of Lithuania and Ministry of Finance forecasts, so we estimated EUR 7 million new allowances for impairment losses due to impact of parameters. And individual assessments gave small but still positive impact.
So this is important and the models itself would be not perfect, but the approach is that we create provision for some unexpected events in the future if something happens, and we are quite sure that due to the fact that these models are conservative, the cushion is sufficient to absorb the future losses, if any. Moving on. Moving on about capital and liquidity position. So I would say in fewer words that it's safe situation. Bank tries to balance interest of two main group of stakeholders, shareholders, and regulators. And saying that, we keep promises that we gave to investors, providing dividends and return for the investments.
At the same time, want to be safe on the safe side and, to, how to say, be, stable and safe when we talk with the regulators, and we feel ourselves, being in a safe position. And, it used to be the case that only capital adequacy ratio limits our, possible dividend, payout, but recently we have more and more new, ratios introduced, and one of these is, related, with the MREL, requirements. And due to the increase since first quarter of 2022, we prepare in advance, and you can see from the graph on the bottom left side of the slide that, we create sufficient reserves, in the form of capital and eligible liabilities to, meet, this increased requirement.
Talking about liquidity situation, again, is safe, and we are well above this limit that we introduced ourselves, taking into account requirement of regulator and also taking additional reserve forming minimum requirement of 150%.... And last but not least, just repeating what Tomas mentioned in the beginning part of the presentation. And so we are keeping our promises, and we are going to intend to propose record high dividends regarding 2023. And this circle in the right-hand side of slide shows that this, what I said earlier, that we are trying to balance interest of all parties and to have enough capital for organic growth and possible M&A transactions.
At the same time, using different forms of payment to shareholders, namely dividends, and more recently introduced share buybacks instrument to provide adequate return to investors. And we tested this share buybacks in this year. Actually, but going to use this in more in bigger scale this year, subject to favorable situation that make this instrument attractive. And from this last graph on the bottom of this slide, most important part is that date, before which shareholders could buy dividends, buy, sorry, shares, in order to have dividends. If shareholders meeting will approve this, the decision, this is the April 12 ex-dividend date, and all shares bought before that will be eligible for dividends. Thank you very much.
Thank you for the comprehensive overview. Now we will proceed with the questions. Before that, I would like to remind you that you can still submit them in the question box on your screen. And the first couple of questions we received are related to the macroeconomic situation in Lithuania, and these are the following: The recent economic results of Lithuania appear to be more favorable compared to the other two Baltic states. What are the reasons behind this disparity, and what has happened to Estonia?
Yeah, thank you very much for the question. Actually, everybody thinks that the Baltics are pretty similar economies, but they differ significantly. For example, Lithuanian economy is more dominated by such sectors as manufacturing, transportation, while Estonian economy is more driven by services. And actually, recent developments in Estonian economy were pretty specific because of the tight dependence on Nordic markets, which experienced challenges in the real estate sector and significant slowdown. So this export market's weakness resulted into poorer results of Estonian exports. On the other hand, Estonia had a pretty strong growth in 2022, given the changes in the country's pension fund system.
When the pension funds were opened, huge funds were injected into the economy, and the GDP increased by around 7%. So that formed a significant comparative base, and that fueled domestic demand unstably. So as a result, in recent years, Estonian economy had to chill out, had to get out of this overheating situation. However, looking to the medium-term outlook, the country still has strong competitive advantages, and hopefully it will manage to recover. In the meantime, the Lithuanian economy had a very nice chapter, as I mentioned, for our exports.
During 2021 and just during 2022, our exports growth was double-digit, and that helped us to prepare for the challenges we faced last year. So, that's shortly it from my side.
Thank you, Indrė. And the next one is: How is Lithuania faring in attracting FDIs? And is there any notable impact from external challenges such as Russia's conflict with Ukraine?
Yeah, actually, it is a very important and painful question because every economist in Lithuania has been following these numbers and statistics, because yeah, our economic development outlook strongly depends on the incoming FDI, because Lithuania need to go through the transformation to higher value added economy and incoming strong businesses add to this transformation. But the good news is that according to the data from Invest Lithuania, the number of projects last year have been only a little lower than the record registered in 2022. So that means that foreign big foreign investors still see Lithuania as a pretty favorable place to come in.
And actually, the whole Central Eastern European region is also benefiting from the current situation, the current global situation of reshoring markets when the developed, when the companies from the developed countries search for the nearer markets for the businesses to develop. So hopefully, this trend will persist further, because as I mentioned, foreign investments are really important for us.
... Thank you very much. And, future expectations are somewhat very important and, of interest of investors. So can you provide some guidance on the anticipated financial results for the year to 2024?
Okay, I will take this. We mentioned forecast for next three years in the presentation of strategic plan, and we also included the same summary slide in material that was presented and shared with you. But I could name several main figures from that list. That main, probably most interesting, ratio is Return on Equity. And our long-term goal is above 15%, what we are declaring consequently the many, many years in a row. But for the next two years, it will be affected negatively, slightly due to our planned investment into the core system. And that will, according to our estimations, the 2024 Return on Equity will be close to 14%, slightly lower.
The other ratios and figures you could see in this material that I mentioned earlier.
Thank you, Donatas. Let's stay with you for the next one, which is: could you please give some detail on the EUR 6 million one-off costs and the negative result contributing from the insurance activities?
Probably this question came before I spent this my part of presentation on operational expenses. So I went through the detail, naming the figures for each factor. So I just only could repeat, but in order to save time, I probably skip it and you could how to say, listen this part of recorded presentation later on.
Okay, thanks. Could you please elaborate a bit more on the surge cost of risk in Q4? It seems like it was mostly model based.
Yes, exactly. Exactly, this is true. Again, probably, similar thinking, what could be interesting to investors and the question that came exactly matched my main idea, what I said. It's model related to allowances for impairments.
Thank you. One participant asked that some more detail about the declining return on equity would be also very helpful.
Yeah. It's still, still my turn, but again, the first part of this question, earlier I, I mentioned that declining is mainly caused by our planned investment into the core system. So this is the main reason, but other, of course, this other increase in expenses is outweighed by increased revenue in the form of commission and net interest income.
Thank you. How do you expect the asset management segment to develop moving forward? Can you please share asset under management targets projections at this point in time?
Yeah, so I will take that question, and thank you for this question. So, well, actually, we do look positively with asset management business, so, and that's one of... was one of the reasons why we did a transaction with Invalda last year. Talking about this year, the asset under management depends from, you know, market fluctuations, but looking to what we can do, so we have a goal to get up to EUR 100 million of inflows during 2024.
Thank you very much. And, I would like to group two questions about macro. Again, at what pace do you expect deposits to develop in the next, say, three to five years? And there has been much of a change in the deposit mix. How do you expect that to evolve during 2024?
Okay, so maybe I'll start because of the word macro. Actually, as Lithuanian outstanding amounts of the deposits have been dominated wrongly by the overnight deposits. So, the dynamics correlate strongly with the growth of earnings in the country. And, actually, the strength of this correlation was pretty obvious and vivid, but it was distorted in 2022, when the governmental measures against COVID kicked in and stimulated deposit growth to strong pace. But, we expect a normalization and to return to the weaker levels of growth.
I believe that if we expect our earnings growth to proceed at 7.5 and later come to 5%, so the deposit growth rate should be close to that. And currently, we see the different situation triggered off by the change in the interest rate environment and the surge in the share of term deposits in the deposit mix. So we believe that this year, this trend will proceed and even accelerate a bit, given the expectations that the monetary policy will ease and the interest rates will go down in the second half of the year, as the markets expect.
So, well, we believe that depositors would like to, to somehow lock in their high interest rates. So, so they will try to benefit from the situation. Maybe my colleagues would like to add something.
So, well, I guess I would say that, well, good answer from Ingrid. From my side, I could add that, looking to the internal stats that we are monitoring closely, we do see that movements from current account accounts to deposits are flattening, the growth rate is flattening. Well, what is good, that we do see some signs of decreasing term deposits rates, so that in the market, so that will stop that, you know, clients' movement to these interest-bearing accounts for the bank and, you know, will help to make cost of funding more growth rate, more flattening.
Thank you for your answer. One more question has arrived: Do you expect to pay windfall tax in 2024?
I'll take this question. So our current structure of loans and deposits, which is very balanced, makes not us not vulnerable to the this windfall tax. And we pay significantly lower amounts in 2023 compared to other other banks, and according to our estimations, we will not be subject to this windfall tax in 2024. So the answer would be zero.
So thank you very much for your answer. It seems like all questions are answered. So on behalf of Šiaulių Bankas and Nasdaq Vilnius, thank you, everyone. It was a pleasure being with you today. The recording of the presentation will be available at Šiaulių Bankas website and on the Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. Dear panelists, thank you for a very informative conference. Dear listeners, thank you for your active participation. Have a great day. Goodbye.