MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -When asked if it was still interested in buying Citibanamex, Citigroup’s (NYSE:C) Mexican retail bank, Grupo Financiero Banorte’s CEO said on Thursday that the company was open to all growth opportunities.
At a press conference about the bank’s quarterly results, CEO Jose Marcos Ramirez Miguel said at a press conference that Banorte is committed to growth and giving shareholders more value.
“We want to grow naturally,” Ramirez Miguel said. He also said that Banorte would think about “other ways to grow operations that give value to shareholders.”
When asked if it wanted to stay in the Citibanamex sale process, the CEO said, “Everything is on the table.”
Banorte’s interest in Citibanamex was first made clear in April, when Ramirez Miguel said that the bank was talking to Citibanamex.
Banorte said earlier on Thursday that its quarterly profit rose by 34% from the same time last year to 11.5 billion pesos ($572 million), thanks to a rise in credit demand for all of its products.
The group, which owns one of the country’s largest banks, generated 28.5 billion pesos in revenue in the second quarter, a 21% increase over the same period last year.
The bank said that the good results happened even though the macroeconomic environment was difficult, with low expectations for economic growth, inflationary pressures, tight monetary policies, and an uncertain international outlook.
In its report, the bank said, “Credit demand grew across all products, even though interest rates were low, and it kept good risk metrics that continued to perform better than we expected.”
($1 = 20.1353 pesos at the end of June)