Once again Anglo Irish Bank beat market forecasts with a 48 per cent jump in first-half profits today and gave a bullish assessment of its prospects for the full year and beyond.
The bank posted record pre-tax profit of €228.6 million for the six months to end-March, with earnings per share up 53 per cent to 51.42 cent.
"The fundamental strength and efficiency of the bank's model and our positioning in each of our markets gives us the confidence to look forward to a continuing strong performance for the year as a whole," the bank said in a statement.
"We remain very positive on the group's prospects for 2005."
Mr Scott Rankin, analyst at Davy Stockbrokers in Dublin, welcomed the figures, saying he would be upgrading his full-year estimates by around five per cent, bringing his EPS forecast to at least euro1.06.
"These are very strong numbers...The market should be happy," he said.
Anglo Irish, which specialises in lending to small and medium-sized businesses and wealthier individuals, said lending work in progress in March was a record €3.4 billion, up from €3 billion in September.
The bank declared an interim dividend of 7.52 cents, up 54 per cent from a year earlier.