Reply #8: UBS Posts Highest Quarterly Profit in Almost 3 Years (Update1) [View All]

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest bank, reported the highest quarterly earnings in almost three years after a rebound at the debt trading unit.

First-quarter pretax profit was at least 2.5 billion Swiss francs ($2.4 billion), the Zurich-based bank said in a statement today, before its annual shareholders’ meeting on April 14. That is the highest pretax result since the second quarter of 2007.

Chief Executive Officer Oswald Gruebel, who joined the bank in February 2009, is relying on a recovery in fixed-income trading to help the bank reach an annual pretax profit of 15 billion francs in the next three to five years. The debt unit reaped about $2.3 billion of revenue in the quarter, people familiar with the matter said on March 29. ...

The bank also said today that net client withdrawals from its wealth management units amounted to about 15 billion francs, down from 45.2 billion francs in the fourth quarter. Asset management had net outflows of about 3 billion francs in the first quarter, UBS said. The bank has seen 373.3 billion francs of net redemptions in the two years through the end of 2009.

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