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Standard Chartered pre-tax profit drops by a quarter

Xinhua, March 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

Standard Chartered PLC, a Britain-based banking group, announced Wednesday that its profit before tax in the year of 2014 was 5.19 billion U.S. dollars, down 25 percent from 2013.

Operating income for the year 2014 was 18.23 billion dollars, 2 percent lower than the previous year's 18.67 billion dollars. Earnings per share (EPS) for the year were 1.46 dollars, also lower than the 2.04 dollars of 2013, data showed.

The group's common equity Tier 1 ratio (CET 1), a gauge of financial stamina, slipped to 10.7 percent at the end of December 2014 from 11.2 percent a year earlier, figures also showed.

Sir John Peace, chairman of the group, said in a statement: "2014 was a challenging year and our performance was disappointing, but it was also a year when we took decisive action to refocus our strategy and to reposition the group for the future and to restore shareholder value."

Peter Sands, the bank's outgoing CEO, said: "We faced a perfect storm: negative sentiment towards emerging markets, a sharp drop in commodity prices, persistent low interest rates and surplus liquidity, low volatility, and a welter of regulatory challenges."

In the past year, the bank, who has big business exposures in emerging markets, issued three profit warnings as it faced tough market conditions.

Last week, Standard Chartered announced that Peace and Sands would step down from their senior positions in 2016 and in June 2015 respectively.

Bill Winters, a former JPMorgan banker, will join the group on May 1 this year as the new CEO, the bank said in a statement. Endit