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.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has