Danske Bank has today raised its full-year profit guidance and said it would resume paying dividends to its shareholders after posting forecast-beating earnings in the second quarter.
“In the first half of the year, we improved our profitability and continued to make progress towards meeting our ambitions for 2023,” CEO Carsten Egeriis said in a statement.
Denmark’s largest lender now expects net profit for 2023 to land in the range of 18.5 billion to 20.5 billion Danish crowns ($2.77 billion-$3.06 billion).
This is up from its earlier estimate of between 16.5 billion and 18.5 billion crowns.
“We improved profitability, primarily through higher income from deposits as a result of the margin expansion and our repricing actions, while net trading income recovered significantly,” Egeriis said.
Danske’s net profit for the April-June quarter rose to 5 billion Danish crowns from 1.7 billion a year earlier, above analysts’ expectations in a company-compiled poll of around 4.6 billion crowns.
The better-than-expected results mirror those of rival Nordic banks Nordea, SEB, DNB and Swedbank, which beat analysts expectations when they published second-quarter results earlier this week.
The bank, which paid no dividend for 2022 due to a $2 billion settlement in the US and Denmark over a massive money-laundering scandal, said it would pay an interim dividend of 7 Danish crowns per share on July 26.
“The losses are lower than expected, and 1.5 billion crowns in loan loss provisions for the whole year acts as a built-in buffer for a further positive guidance change,” Nordnet analyst Per Hansen said in a note.