UBS, the largest Swiss bank, closed the second quarter of this year with a marked increase in profit, higher than the expectations prevailing among analysts in the Swiss market. The net profit for the April-June period is 2 billion dollars (the bank has its balance sheet in US currency), ie 1.7 billion euros at the current exchange rate, 63% more than a year earlier. For the entire first half of this year, net profit was 3.83 billion dollars, compared to 2.82 billion for the same period of 2020. The market has welcomed the results of the Swiss banking group, the UBS share. in Zurich it was up by around 3% in the mid-session, with the SMI index up by about 0.5%.
UBS’s core business is asset management, in which it is an international leader, flanked by investment banking and retail banking activities (the latter only for the Swiss market). And it was the asset management business that drove the group’s accounts. In fact, in the second quarter the Global Wealth Management branch recorded a pre-tax profit of 1.3 billion dollars; for Asset Management, the quarterly pre-tax profit was 0.3 billion, for the Investment Bank it was 0.7 billion, and for Personal & Corporate Banking it was 0.5 billion.
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The group remains committed to the cost reduction plan. The total workforce at 30 June was 71,304 employees, 475 fewer than at the end of March. UBS continues with its own share buyback plan; after acquiring its securities for $ 1.4 billion at the beginning of the year, the bank plans to buy more, for $ 600 million, during the third quarter.
The UBS top management did not take a leap in terms of business forecasts for the next few months and limited themselves to indicating that seasonal factors could affect the third quarter, with slightly weaker activity on the part of customers.
The chief executive officer, the Dutch Ralph Hamers, however, expressed his satisfaction with the results of the second quarter: “It’s a good day for UBS,” he said during a conference call, noting how the group’s strategies are bearing fruit. Hamers, who took over last November from Sergio Ermotti from Ticino (who headed the bank for many years), underlined the underlying optimism of customers: «We see that our customers around the world are more optimistic. Of course there are still uncertainties, about inflation, which we think is also transitory, and about the Delta variant of the coronavirus that could slow down economic growth. But the underlying trend remains positive ».