By Tom Sims
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Deutsche Bank swung to better-than-expected net profit in the first quarter of 2021 as strength at the investment bank helped offset the headwinds of an ongoing restructuring program and the coronavirus pandemic.
Deutsche painted a rosier look for 2021, saying it now expects revenues to be “essentially flat,” compared with a previous estimate of “marginally lower”.
The German lender said on Wednesday that its first-quarter net profit attributable to shareholders was 908 million euros ($1.10 billion), which compares with a year-earlier loss of 43 million euros. Analysts had expected a profit of almost 600 million euros.
It was the strongest quarter for Deutsche since the first quarter of 2014, as revenue at its fixed-income trading business and origination and advisory services surged, trends that have also lifted profits of competing banks.
(GRAPHIC: Deutsche Bank quarterly results – https://graphics.reuters.com/DEUTSCHEBANK-RESULTS/rlgvdzzmwvo/chart.png)
“These results give us confidence that we’ll reach our 2022 targets,” Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing said.
($1 = 0.8282 euros)
(Reporting by Tom Sims and Patricia Uhlig; Editing by Riham Alkousaa, Kirsti Knolle)
