Deutsche Bank AG earned 1.8 billion euros (US$2.4 billion) in the first quarter of the year, a gain over last year amid improving results from the selling of debt and equities, the bank said yesterday.
That compared with a net profit of 1.2 billion euros in the first quarter of last year.
The bank, based in Frankfurt and Germany’s biggest lender, said its net revenues rose 24 percent to 9 billion euros in the January-March period compared with 7.2 billion euros last year.
Despite the gain, the bank said the results reflected 241 million euros in write-downs, but added that the year-ago figure also included write-downs of 1 billion euros and a charge of 500 million euros.
Still, Deutsche Bank said record pretax profit at its corporate and investment bank unit along with improved revenues from selling and trading debt and equities, lifted its first-quarter results higher.
“The economic environment clearly stabilized in the first quarter 2010, but is not without some remaining vulnerability,” chief executive Josef Ackermann said in a statement.
Separately, Britain’s partly nationalized Lloyds Banking Group said yesterday that it turned a profit in the first quarter as the rate of impairments on bad loans slowed.
In a trading update, Lloyds said such provisions were lower in both its retail and wholesale divisions.
Lloyds, created from the merger of Lloyds TSB and Halifax/Bank of Scotland, said it was also making good progress on integration savings, and expects to achieve £2 billion (US$3.1 billion) worth of synergies and other savings by the end of next year.
The government has a 41 percent stake in the bailed-out firm.
Customer deposits rose by £5 billion in the first quarter, while lending balances were little changed, the company said.
“Impairments have slowed significantly in the first few months of the year giving us confidence that we will achieve a better financial performance than previously guided,” CEO Eric Daniels said.
“I am pleased to report that we returned to profitability in the first quarter and expect this momentum to be sustained throughout 2010,” Daniels said.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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