DDeutsche Bank made billions in profit in 2021 and had its best result in ten years. The pre-tax profit climbed within a year from a good one billion euros to around 3.4 billion euros, as Germany’s largest financial institution announced on Thursday in Frankfurt.
After taxes, the balance sheet stood at 2.5 billion euros, more than four times as much as in the first year of the pandemic. After deducting interest payments to the holders of certain bonds, the bottom line is a good 1.9 billion euros. In 2020 as a whole, Deutsche Bank made a profit again for the first time after five years of losses in a row with 113 million euros.
“All four business areas are developing as planned or even better, and we have made faster progress than expected in reducing old stocks,” summarized CEO Christian Sewing. The expected costs of the restructuring of the group have been almost completely digested. Sewing initiated a comprehensive renovation of the money house in 2019. Entire departments have been closed, risky parts of investment banking have been shed and severe austerity measures have been initiated. Around 18,000 jobs are to be lost worldwide. In 2021, the bank also benefited from the fact that it had to set aside significantly less money for possible loan defaults than in the first year of the corona pandemic.
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The biggest profit maker was again investment banking, in which the Dax group earns money by trading bonds and currencies, for example. After two zero rounds, shareholders should again receive a profit share for the 2021 financial year. The Frankfurt money house announced on Wednesday that it would buy back its own shares for 300 million euros in the first half of 2022 and pay a dividend of 20 cents per share for 2021.
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Overall, this would mean a distribution of around 700 million euros to the shareholders. This is a first step towards the goal of paying out five billion euros to shareholders over time. The last time the institute paid a dividend of eleven cents for the 2018 financial year.
Sewing had already promised the shareholders at the last general meeting in May that the bank had made a firm decision to pay a dividend again.