Citigroup: Quarterly earnings up, but lower than market expectation

The US third largest banking group, Citigroup Inc., Thursday said that its net income in the fourth quarter 2013 stood at 2.69 billion U.S. dollars, a big jump over net income of 1.2 billion dollars in the same period of 2012. The results means per-share earnings of 0.85 dollars, well below the market expectation of 0.95 dollars per share. Citigroup reported that its adjusted fixed-income trading revenue fell 15 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier and it attributed the decline to less client activity in credit and securitized markets. Moreover, lower mortgage originations also affected Citigroup's performance as higher interest rates restrained the refinancing. Its U.S. mortgage originations slumped 51 percent from the year earlier. Michael Corbat, Citigroup's chief executive officer, said " although we didn't finish the year as strongly as we would have liked, we made substantial progress toward our key priorities in 2013. Having grown our operating net income by 15 percent over 2012, we achieved our highest amount of net income since before the financial crisis." He added Citigroup also improved efficiency by executing on the repositioning actions announced at the end of 2012, reducing expenses and growing revenues. For the full year of 2013, Citigroup's net income was 13.9 billion dollars on revenues of 76.4 billion dollars, while for the full year of 2012, it recorded net income of 7.5 billion dollars on revenues of 69.1 billion dollars.