(Bloomberg) -- Societe Generale SA took another step toward reducing its business in Africa, joining a long list of European lenders who have retreated from the continent.
The French bank on Friday said it agreed to sell its subsidiary in Guinea to Atlantic Financial Group, a Pan-African banking group, for an undisclosed price. SocGen has now agreed to sell 11 of 17 African units since the beginning of last year. It’s reviewing options for two more and hasn’t made any announcements for the remaining four.
The move is part of Chief Executive Officer Slawomir Krupa’s strategy to focus the lender on more profitable businesses. He’s also sold the equipment finance business and a wealth management unit in the UK.
Shares of SocGen fell 0.9% at 4:13 p.m. in Paris. They have declined almost 5% over the past 12 months, the second-worst performer in an index of European lenders.
SocGen last year had one of the highest headcounts on the African continent among European lenders, according to a Bloomberg News tally. The French firm is among the few European banks alongside Standard Chartered Plc that still operates across a large number of African countries. Rivals including BNP Paribas SA, Barclays Plc and BPCE largely pulled out, the tally shows.
Barclays for a long time was one of Europe’s biggest banks in Africa but it has since withdrawn almost completely, with the exception of 9 staff in South Africa, according to its latest annual report. The lender’s headcount on the continent was over 40,000 a decade ago, the Bloomberg review showed.
BNP Paribas has also reduced its presence substantially, agreeing to sell out of operations in Tunisia in 2019 and South Africa a few years later. As a result, the regional workforce of France’s largest bank has decreased from roughly 9,000 a decade ago to a little over 2,000 last year, according to the tally.
The reduction in employees doesn’t mean the banks don’t operate in Africa anymore. Several continue to offer banking services in various countries.
“African markets are higher risk and the level of returns of local subsidiaries, from the French parent’s perspective, is often not enough to justify a presence there,” Fitch Ratings analysts Jamal El Mellali and Ramy Habibi Alaoui said by email.
--With assistance from Alexandre Rajbhandari and Harry Wilson.
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