Citi’s Profits More Than Double As Restructuring Continues

As it continues to shed business units and streamline operations, Citigroup Inc. reported Tuesday that earnings more than doubled from a year earlier.

Revenue generated from the New York-based company’s brokerage and asset management businesses increased 25.5% to $340 million from the previous quarter, but sank from $1.6 billion a year earlier. In the past year, Citi [C] has been selling businesses, including its insurance and retail brokerage units as part of its effort to transform from a financial supermarket to a global bank that caters to wealthy customers.

As part of this effort, Citi announced last week it would sell three alternative investment units to Skybridge Capital LLC, a hedge-fund seeding firm.

"We are proud of our first-quarter results but remain cautious about the environment, given the uncertain economic recovery and high unemployment in the U.S.," Vikram Pandit, Citi’s chief executive officer said in a press release. "Realistically, we do not expect our performance to follow an invariable trend-line upward."

For the first quarter overall, Citi reported its earnings rose to $4.43 billion, or 15 cents a share, from a profit of $1.59 million a year earlier. Revenue increased 3.7% to $25.42 billion. Analysts expected the company to barely break-even in the quarter with revenue of $20.77 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Revenue generated by Citi’s securities and banking arm declined 34% as profit fell 48%. This is in sharp contrast tom J.P. Morgan Chase [JPM] and Bank of America [BAC] who saw a significant surge in these results when they reported earnings last week.

Citi Holdings, which includes the assets that the company is in the process of selling, saw its loss from continuing operations decrease to $876 million from $5.49 billion.