Citigroup's (NYSE: C) first earnings release of 2021 -- published on Friday morning -- was a combination of encouraging and discouraging developments, perhaps leaning a bit more toward the latter.
For its Q4 of fiscal 2020, the bank earned just under $16.5 billion in revenue, which was down from the $18.4 billion in the same quarter the previous year. That was on the back of a 3% year-over-year decline in loans, although the company's total deposits saw significant growth of 20%.
Net income, like revenue, also declined, landing at $4.6 billion ($2.08 per share) versus Q4 2019's $5.0 billion. There's a very large asterisk next to this figure, however; a credit reserve release lifted the metric by $1.5 billion. This in turn boosted the per-share figure to well above the average analyst estimate, which, according to Zacks, was $1.35.
Source Fool.com