The story
The origins of Erste Group are in the founding of the Erste österreichische Spar-Casse in October 1819 in Leopoldstadt, a suburb of Vienna.
The IPO in Vienna in 1997 was conducted under the unified Erste Bank, which also handled subsequent capital increases until 2006. Some of these transactions were the largest of their kind ever executed in Vienna's financial market. The capital raised was used to finance Erste Bank's acquisitions in Central and Eastern Europe.
On 9 August 2008, the former Erste Bank Oesterreich was split up into the newly founded holding company Erste Group Bank AG and the subsidiary Erste Bank der österreichischen Sparkassen AG; the foreign subsidiaries were taken over by the new holding company. From then on, Erste Group included all companies of the group.
Effects of the financial crisis
In October 2011, Erste Bank said it expected a full year loss of up to EUR 1.1 billion, after writedowns and provisions of EUR 1.6 billion. This would be its first loss since at least 1988. It said the writedowns were due to government intervention in Hungary, where it was forced to take losses on Swiss franc mortgages, and a slower than expected recovery in Romania. In August 2013, Erste Group Bank AG was the first Austrian bank to fully repay the participation capital of EUR 1.76 billion issued in 2009 which consisted of EUR 1.22 billion from the Republic of Austria and EUR 540 million from private investors. From 2009 to 2012, the Republic of Austria received annual dividend payments from Erste Group of EUR 98 million and private investors of EUR 43 million. Including the pro rata dividend for 2013 which paid in June 2014 after the corresponding resolution is passed by the annual shareholders' meeting, the Republic of Austria received EUR 448 million and private investors EUR 198 million in dividends.
From Wikipedia’s article on Erste Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5