After struggling with three consecutive losing quarters, ING Group announced today that it enjoyed a small profit in their second quarter, coming in at $100 million, although down significantly from the same period last year when the recorded profits of well over $2 billion.
Even so, the continual weakness in real estate, with write-downs and loan losses putting downward pressure on its profits, results were far less than the almost $400 million in profits being looked for by analysts.
Unsurprisingly the North American market was the primary real estate culprit, with Canadian industrial commercial properties accounting for €251 million of the €584 million write-downs, while write-downs in the U.S. market accounted for remaining €323 million.
ING has also been deleveraging, cutting its overall assets by about 15 percent since last year; a drop of about €85 billion.
Jan Hommen, chief executive of ING said there has been a lot of interest in the assets held by ING, and they would be easy to sell if they were willing to drop the price, but added they aren’t going to go that route, and will continue to expect top dollar for their assets.
Unnamed sources cited by Reuters claim that ING is looking to unload private banking assets in Asia and Switzerland sometime in the fall.
Since the beginning of the economic crisis, ING Bank has eliminated 8,200 full-time workers, and asserts it has accomplished over fifty percent of its goal of cutting costs of €1 billion they have as a target this year.
