Many of the banks with a less than 3% market share lost groundin recession year 2009 due to either freezing or significantlyslowing down lending due to diminished funding from parentbanks.
Turkish-held Garanti was among the exceptions, being one of themost aggressive players on the segment of small banks, and makingup a little over 1% of the market's balance sheet assets, from 0.6%in 2008.
Banca Carpatica, a bank with Romanian capital, also boosted itsmarket share from 0.8% to 1%. In both cases, the rise in marketshare saw the banks post net financial losses, but the two banksare in different situations: Garanti is pursuing an expansion planwith support from its Turkish parent bank, whilst Carpatica isaffected by the lack of a strong investor in its shareholderstructure, and is waiting for a 25 million-euro share capitalincrease by April.
Portuguese bank Millennium also gained 0.2% of the market,boosting its share to 0.6%, but continued to see losses after itssecond full year of operations on the Romanian market.
Just outside the top 10 were Greek-held Piraeus Bank and BancaRomaneasca - NBG, in that order, with both banks seeing theirmarket shares shrink after coming very close to the 3% mark in2008.
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