The ANZ Bank will pay an unchanged interim dividend of 72 cents a share after an unimpressive first half performance saw a 4% rise in cash earnings.
The country’s third big major said cash profit from continuing operations was $3.113 billion, up 4% from the March half’s $2.990 billion, but down 3% from the September 2021 final half.
Statutory profit was up 20% to $3.5 billion from the March, 2021 half.
Helping the result was a release from its provisions of $284 million in the half year, down from the $491 million in the same period of 2020-21.
For some odd reason the ANZ chose to make most of its comparisons with the September, final half of 2021, not the first half which is the conventional way of assessing a listed company’s performance. That makes the latest half year performance look a bit worse than it seems when compared to the year ago quarter.
Bank CEO Shayne Elliot said in the statement to the ASX that the ANZ said positive balance sheet growth in Australia driven by improvements in home loan processing capacity” which had been its major area of weakness in 2020 and 2021.
He said the ANZ also saw strong home loan momentum in New Zealand delivering market share growth, institutional customer revenues grow strongly with higher risk-adjusted lending margins.
He said the banks costs “were tightly managed with ‘run the bank’ expenses coming in flat for the half with investment focussed on operational resilience and new growth opportunities.”
The net interest margin eased to 1.58% from 1.63% a year ago and the bank’s cost to income ratio improved to 50.5 cents in the dollar from 53.8 cents in the dollar a year ago.
On Tuesday night the ANZ lifted its variable mortgage loam rate by the full 0.25%. The NAB joined the others on Wednesday morning.
