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HSBC reported 58% profit increase for the first quarter

The profit of the Europe's largest bank HSBC has increased by 58% in first quarter, due to the lower taxes and lower provisions for bad loans. The main profit of HSBC, however, decreased slightly after the costs for the period increased significantly, while the revenue is decreasing slightly. The HSBC net profit was amounted to 4.15 billion dollars for the first quarter compared with 2.6 billion dollars a year ago. The increase in positive financial result is due largely to lower taxes and increases of the Latest Gold Prices.
However, the profit before tax was amounted to $ 5.5 billion compared with $ 6 billion an year ago. The market expectations were for a higher profit before taxes of $ 6 billion.
The HSBC's revenue decreased slightly to 17.04 billion dollars compared with 17.9 billion dollars last year, mainly due to smaller revenues from consumer lending in the U.S. The aim of the new chief executive Stuart Gulliver of the Bank is to reduce costs to improve profitability of HSBC. In his words, HSBC will seek to improve not only profit from emerging markets, but also from developed markets such as Europe. The growth of HSBC in the first quarter is the strongest in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, while in Europe, profit before tax have fallen sharply from about 65%, while in the U.S. fell by 60 per cent. The share of cost of revenues of the bank increased to 60.9 percent in the first quarter compared with 49.6 percent a year ago. The increase in operating costs comes as a result of the larger salaries of staff in the investment banking division of HSBC.
The shares of HSBC dropped by 1.6 percent on the London Stock Exchange in today's session, giving the bank's market value of 114.4 billion pounds. Her papers have risen by 1.9% over the past 12 months. HSBC is the sixth largest financial services company in the world and the eighth largest company, according to data from Forbes magazine for 2010