Question. Context: State Bank of India (SBI) is an Indian multinational, public sector banking and financial services company. It is a government-owned corporation with its headquarters in Mumbai, Maharashtra. On April 1, 2017, the State Bank of India, which was India's largest bank, merged with five of its associate banks (State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Travancore), and with the Bharatiya Mahila Bank. This was the first ever large scale consolidation in the Indian banking industry. With the merger, SBI became one of the 50 largest banks in the world (balance sheet size of 33 trillion, 278,000 employees, 420 million customers, and more than 24,000 branches and 59,000 ATMs). SBI's market share was projected to increase to 22 percent from 17 per cent. It has 198 offices in 37 countries; 301 correspondents in 72 countries. The company is ranked 232nd on the Fortune Global 500 list of the world's biggest corporations as of 2016.

Question: total number of state bank of india branches?
Answer. 24,000 branches
What step-by-step reasoning justifies that answer?
Reasoning: The relevant information to answer the above question is: With the merger, SBI became one of the 50 largest banks in the world (balance sheet size of 33 trillion, 278,000 employees, 420 million customers, and more than 24,000 branches and 59,000 ATMs).