Bear Stearns Cos Inc. on Wednesday posted a 32 percent rise in profit, boosted by the brokerage's "best ever" quarterly results in fixed income and higher investment banking and trading revenue.
"They were firing on all cylinders," said Reilly Tierney, an analyst at Fox-Pitt, Kelton Inc. "It looked liked the fixed income trading number was the principal driver of the upside surprise, but everything across the board in terms of revenues was better than I was looking for."
The New York-based company reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $361.1 million, or $2.57 a share, compared with $274.3 million, or $2 a share, a year earlier.
Net revenue rose 14 percent to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion for the first quarter a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, expected the company to report earnings of $2.03 per share on revenue of $1.51 billion, according to Reuters Research, a unit of Reuters Group Plc.
The quarterly report comes a day after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said its quarterly profit more than doubled, driven by higher revenue from bond and equity trading, stock sales and mergers. Lehman also forecast growth in 2004 across its major business lines, inside and outside the United States.
Fixed income net revenues rose 4 percent to $822.3 million in what Bear Stearns called its "best ever" quarterly results. Investment banking net revenues were $253.2 million, up 35 percent from $187.8 million in the year earlier period.
Bear Stearns recently ranked 11th in 2004 in underwriting global stock and bond sales, arranging $23.1 billion of offerings. It ranked 11th as well in mergers advice, handling $70.01 billion of transactions, data from Thomson Financial shows.
Bear Stearns said its institutional equities net revenues rose 8 percent to $297.4 million.
