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.
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