Commerzbank preliminary results 2013

Also Commerzbank decided to graze us with the preliminary results for 2013 and it can be found here. All the following information is taken from that source.

The report seemed to be well accepted by the market and the share price directly jumped up a couple of %-age units. So why are everyone happy? And more importantly am I happy?


My guess is that this summary table that they have made is what makes someone happy enough to want to buy shares in Commerzbank today:

I will just pick the ones I like in there and mentioned those a bit more in detail...

78 million euro profit... hmmm... that gives us (since the doubling of shares) an EPS of 0.069 € which gives us a current P/E of 200, but ok, there were some restructuring costs in there also that they want to add up as a huge profit that should have been there. So lets us then calculate with that then we get an EPS of 0.502 € and a P/E of 27. Hmmm... that is still a bad, bad result and that is what they tried to impress me with?

Secondly starting to calculate a RoE on the profitable part of the bank (all the rest is making losses) and show a figure for that is just silly and even worse that silly RoE that they try to impress with is only 9.5% so still a bad RoE value which falls well in line with my first point.

So the operating result is lower in 2013 than what it was in 2012, good. They did however make a small profit which is indeed good. They have managed to improve the Core Tier which is also very good. The decrease in assets is very large from 2012 to 2013 and I get the feeling that I must find out what has been going on there when the real annual report arrives.

Conclusion: They seem to be on the good way but they keep making me unhappy and annoyed by making up fairy tales and pushing fake things into the spotlight and on the other hand the carpet under the table seem to ooze like a compost heap during high season. As a shareholder in the company I want to see the bare truth without the white gloves on and I even think that I deserve to see that. I will stay as shareholder and I will probably keep complaining on them.