Standard Chartered (LON:STAN) - Full year results 2010
Performance
An eighth consecutive year of record profits. What's driven the performance?
It's been a very good year - 19% increase in profits, 14% increase in earnings per share, 14.1% return on equity. What's driven this is very broad-based income growth, across both businesses, across multiple geographies, and underlying that, very strong momentum in the balance sheet, strong momentum in the underlying level of transactions.
And it's important to point out that this isn't a bounce back or a recovery story. This is yet another year of delivery on the back of prior record profits and income.
The Group has delivered negative working profit. So do you still consider Standard Chartered a growth stock?
Absolutely, we're a growth stock. We have very good momentum in both businesses. If you look at the Consumer Banking business, income was up 8% year on year, and H2 income, second half income, was up 9% on the first half. And if you look at the Wholesale bank, the real driver of the momentum of the Wholesale bank is client income, and that was up 17%.
And if you go beyond the income figures and look at what's actually going on, in terms of the balance sheet, momentum, in terms of transactions, you see momentum all across the business and across multiple geographies. Deposits were up 23% year on year. Assets were up 22%. And in all the different parts of the business, so for example trade transactions were up 20%, mortgages were up 23%. We've got very good momentum.
The Group does have negative Jaws at 8% So have you really got control of your cost base?
What you've got going on here is a bit of a normalisation from the sharp pull-back in costs that we did…
