Santander reports 2013 profit jump

Madrid - Spain's Santander bank, the largest in the eurozone by market value, reported Thursday a 90.5-percent leap in net profits for 2013, hailing a "turnaround" after weathering years of economic crisis.

Financial troubles in Spain and other fragile eurozone economies had forced Santander to slash the estimated value of its assets in past years, eroding its profits.

In 2013, however, net profit leapt to €4.37bn ($6bn), up 90.5% from the previous year.

Net banking income fell 13.3% to €25.935bn over the same period.

"After several years of strengthening the balance sheet and capital, Banco Santander is embarking on a period of strong profit growth in the coming years," Santander chairperson Emilio Botin said in a statement.

Santander said the 2013 results marked a "turnaround" after the declining profits of recent years,

Despite the eurozone's problems, Santander said its worldwide operations had allowed it to produce a profit in every quarter of the past five years.

In 2013, it said, 53% of group profit came from emerging markets.

Over the five years of crisis, the bank said it had set aside €65bn in provisions and boosted the share of rock solid core capital by €18.4bn, or 4.13 percentage points, to 11.7% of all capital.

In the final quarter of 2013 alone, Santander said net profit more than doubled to €1.06bn from €423m a year earlier. Net banking income fell 11.6% to €6.28bn over the same period.

The results were slightly weaker than anticipated by investors, however, leading the bank's shares to dip by 1.6% to €6.279 in mid-morning trade on the Madrid stock exchange.

Santander said only seven percent of its 2013 profits came from Spain.

Some 23% of the profits came from Brazil, 17% from Britain and 10% each from the United States and Mexico.

A property market collapse in 2008 left many of Spain's banks awash with bad loans.

Spain obtained a €41.3bn eurozone rescue loan to shore up the balance sheets of fragile institutions under a financial sector programme, which it exited on January 23.

Under the programme, which did not affect healthy institutions such as Santander, hard-hit Spanish banks transferred many of their dodgy assets to a "bad bank", called Sareb, which is pooling the bad assets so as to sell them at a discount.