The UAE has emerged as a strategic focus for Russia and Sber, with the bank prepared to deploy its artificial intelligence capabilities in collaboration with Middle Eastern partners. This stance was voiced by Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors at Sberbank, in an interview with Asharq News, a prominent Arab television channel.
Vedyakhin noted that Sber keeps a close watch on its clients, engages actively with them, and supports expansion into markets that matter most to Russian business. He stressed that the UAE represents a key priority for regional growth and expressed a clear willingness to share Sber’s technology with Arab partners as part of that strategy.
Reflecting on Sber’s recent performance, the executive highlighted a record annual profit of 1.5 trillion rubles for 2023, which translates to about 16.4 billion dollars. He described the result as pure profit, even amid current constraints, and credited last year’s new strategy for delivering strong returns to shareholders, including a target of 22 percent return on capital and a 50 percent dividend payout. He also emphasized Sber’s leadership in the Moscow Stock Exchange and its reputation as one of the most attractive investments in Russia for this century, underscoring the company’s robust market position.
According to Vedyakhin, Sber has demonstrated consistent outperformance across the Russian market since 2000. He expressed optimism for the future, promising continued profits for shareholders and stable, high-quality service for customers as the company pursues its growth trajectory.
He underscored the growing role of artificial intelligence across all sectors of the economy. In construction, agriculture, and medicine, AI is accelerating productivity by five to seven times and lifting profits two to three times. He projected that Russia’s GDP would gain around one percent from AI in the coming years, a figure with clear implications not only for Russia but for its global partners as well. Sber intends to lead the way by developing AI capabilities in-house and helping customers deploy them, he said.
Vedyakhin described Sber as a center of AI expertise that actively disseminates knowledge and best practices. He pointed to the collaboration among two leading Russian developers of neural network models, Yandex and Sber, with Sber’s own model named GigaChat. He claimed GigaChat has surpassed ChatGPT 3.5 in official benchmarks and suggested that it would soon close the gap with ChatGPT 4 as well, indicating rapid progress in native AI development within Russia. The studio guest stressed that generative artificial intelligence remains one of Sber’s most critical focus areas.
Additionally, Vedyakhin highlighted the Kandinsky neural network as a notable example of Sber’s AI capabilities. He described Kandinsky as capable of drawing, understanding, and rendering video content with quality that competes with leading solutions in the field, such as Midjourney. He implied that these advances position Sber at the forefront of practical AI applications and creative tools within the industry, reinforcing the bank’s role as a leading innovator in the artificial intelligence space. [Source: Sberbank interview by Asharq News]