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Deutsche Bank achieves record results

2023-02-02T08:00:20.353Z


It is the best balance sheet for the group in 15 years: In 2022, Deutsche Bank made a net profit of around five billion euros - more than doubling it.


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Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt am Main

Photo: ALEX DOMANSKI/ REUTERS

Deutsche Bank has recently earned more than it has since before the financial crisis.

The bottom line for the bank last year was a profit of 5.02 billion euros - an increase of 159 percent.

"In 2022 we achieved the best result in fifteen years," said CEO Christian Sewing on Thursday.

In the times before the financial crisis from 2008, profits in the billions were common.

In its record year 2007, Deutsche Bank achieved a pre-tax profit of more than EUR 8.7 billion and a surplus of around EUR 6.5 billion.

But Germany's largest bank had to clean up its balance sheet after the great crisis and made losses for five years in a row up to and including 2019.

In the summer of 2019, Sewing, who had been promoted to the top position a year earlier, initiated a fundamental realignment of the group: investment banking was trimmed, global stock trading ended, and the integration of Postbank into private customer business was pushed ahead.

In 2020, Deutsche Bank closed a year with a profit for the first time.

"The transformation of Deutsche Bank over the past three and a half years has been a success," Sewing summed up on Thursday.

»By concentrating on our strengths, we have become significantly more profitable, diversified and efficient.«

Investment bank profit falls

Last year, things went well for Deutsche Bank, especially in business with private customers and companies.

The corporate bank more than doubled its pre-tax profit to EUR 2.1 billion.

At two billion euros, the private customer bank even earned more than five times as much as a year earlier.

The two segments together thus yielded more than the investment bank, on whose success Deutsche Bank had long depended.

In 2022, the investment bank's profit fell by six percent to 3.5 billion euros.

Asset management also yielded less: the pre-tax profit of the in-house fund company DWS collapsed by 27 percent to 598 million euros.

As with other institutes, the turnaround in interest rates helped business.

In the fourth quarter, Deutsche Bank's pre-tax profit increased more than ninefold within a year: to 775 million euros.

The bottom line for the period October up to and including December was 1.8 billion euros in the books after 145 million euros a year earlier.

After Deutsche Bank had increased its earnings - i.e. total income - last year to 27.2 billion euros (plus seven percent), also thanks to the rise in interest rates, CFO James von Moltke expects a further increase this year to up to 29 billion euros.

Meanwhile, the board fears hardly more loan defaults in 2023 than in the previous year - despite the difficult economic situation as a result of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and high inflation.

From today's perspective, risk provisions for impaired loans will reach 0.25 percent rather than 0.30 percent of the loan volume in the current year, explained von Moltke.

Last year, Deutsche Bank invested a good 1.2 billion euros in risk provisioning, more than twice as much as in 2021.

30 cent dividend

The bank even exceeded the return target for the full year 2022, which analysts had long doubted: the after-tax return on tangible equity reached 9.4 percent, the target was eight percent.

For 2025, the Management Board confirmed the goal of achieving a return of more than ten percent.

In 2021 it was 3.8 percent.

The shareholders of the Dax group should participate in the good figures: After a dividend of 20 cents per share for the 2021 financial year, there should be 30 cents for the past year.

yes/Reuters/dpa

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2023-02-02

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