Corporate Info Press Release

Press Release

Trading Update

Thomas Gottstein, Chief Executive Officer of Credit Suisse, and David Mathers, Chief Financial Officer, are due to present at the annual Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference in London today.

Ahead of that, Credit Suisse issues the following update prior to entering the close of the period for its first quarter results on March 31, 2020, which are scheduled to be announced on April 23, 2020.

Firstly, we would emphasize that the health and safety of our employees, our clients and our stakeholders is of utmost importance. We have implemented responsive contingency measures globally to help protect against the spread of COVID-19 while providing continuity of service. And we will continue to develop and enhance these measures over the coming weeks.

Notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant volatile market environment, profitability in 1Q 2020 has so far continued the strong year-on-year improvement trend as already noted in our 4Q 2019 Earnings Release.

In our Wealth Management businesses, overall private banking revenues so far this quarter are up compared to the same period last year, benefiting from higher transaction revenues. The teams across our Markets businesses have done an excellent job in these volatile markets and, as a consequence, sales and trading revenues are significantly higher quarter to date compared to the same period in 1Q 2019. This so far has offset the negative impact of the market environment on the execution of our primary capital markets pipeline. Our return on tangible equity is above 10% for the first two months of the year, and our pre-tax income for the same period exceeds the CHF 1.06 billion reported for the whole of 1Q 2019.

Credit Suisse continues to benefit from the strengthening of our capital base since we started our restructuring in 3Q 2015, the rebalancing of our business towards wealth management and from the disciplined approach that we have applied to costs, resources and capital management. Together with the benefit of the cumulative growth in our stable deposit base and of our lower exposures compared to previous periods in areas such as leveraged finance and the Oil & Gas sector, this has substantially increased our resilience and preparedness for the impact of the spread of COVID-19 and the consequent market and economic volatility. The impact of the pandemic on our financial results going forward remains difficult to assess at this stage and we continue to monitor our credit exposures prudently in light of these conditions. However, we are very satisfied with how the teams have so far navigated the increased volatility, including in areas such as share-backed lending.

We recognize the pressure and challenges to our clients in this environment, both as a consequence of the health concerns and the potential economic impact, and we look to continue to support our customers during this difficult period.

Audio webcast

Thomas Gottstein and David Mathers will present at the Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference at  08:00 GMT / 09:00 CET today, March 19, 2020.

To listen, please register.