Deutsche Bank reported a heavy net loss for the second quarter of 2019 of €3.1 billion, after taking €3.4 billion of charges for the transformation it announced on July 7, which will see it exit secondary equities and scale back in rates.
Christian Sewing, chief executive officer, says: “We have already taken significant steps to implement our strategy to transform Deutsche Bank. These are reflected in our results. A substantial part of our restructuring costs is already digested in the second quarter. Excluding transformation charges, the bank would be profitable. In our more stable businesses, revenues were flat or growing.”
Clearly the bank is attempting to front load as much of the expense as it can in 2019 to give it a chance of reporting a token profit next year. It had said it might take €2.8 billion of charges in the second quarter but has got ahead of this target by refining impairment and evaluation calculations sufficiently.
So, Deutsche has already absorbed almost 46% out of the total of €7.4 billion in expenses it expects to take for the whole transformation through to 2022.
