On the heels of four straight quarterly losses, UBS AG is expecting to return a small third-quarter profit when its earnings are released Nov. 4, the bank’s chairman, Peter Kurer, said in a speech today during a shareholder meeting in Basel, Switzerland.
The improved performance of UBS is a result of the Zurich, Switzerland-based bank’s substantially reducing its exposure to troubled U.S. real estate investments by disposing of many of those assets, he said in his speech.
UBS has suffered from the global credit crunch, booking more than $40 billion in subprime-related write-downs in the last year, including $5.1 billion during the second quarter, which caused a net quarterly loss of $329 million (InvestmentNews, Aug. 12).
The losses have prompted UBS to announce the planned separation of its investment-banking, global-asset-management and wealth management units into three autonomous operations by the end of 2009.
UBS’ shares were up $1.12, or 5.91%, to $20.07 during early-afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
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