By Valentina Za
MILAN (Reuters) -UniCredit on Wednesday confirmed its profit outlook for the year after reporting higher-than-expected quarterly income thanks to trading gains.
Italy’s second-biggest bank said net profit in the July-September quarter was 2.6 billion euros ($3 billion), beating a company-provided analyst consensus forecast of 2.4 billion euros.
Revenues were similarly ahead of analyst expectations thanks to income from the bank’s trading activity, which more than doubled in the quarter versus the previous three months.
It confirmed a profit goal for the year of 10.5 billion euros.
UniCredit said its ambition was to grow net profit above 11 billion in 2027 despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, helped by the contribution to earnings from stakes in Germany’s Commerzbank and Greece’s Alpha Bank.
The stakes are part of the complex M&A strategy of CEO Andrea Orcel, who joined UniCredit in 2021 after a three-decade career in investment banking advising on Europe’s biggest banking deals.
UniCredit had been looking for an acquisition, but it has so far failed to clinch one, in part due to clashes with national governments in Germany and Italy.
In response, Orcel has said stakebuilding could be the way to proceed.
“We have now six and a half billion invested in two stakes that, through consolidation, are adding 1 billion more than we had in our numbers before to 2027,” he told CNBC television on Wednesday.
UniCredit tried to join the consolidation wave sweeping Italy’s financial sector in recent months by bidding for smaller peer Banco BPM but dropped the offer in July partly due to a clash with the Rome government.
($1 = 0.8575 euros)
(Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Giulia Segreti, Tom Hogue and Kate Mayberry)
