French bank Société Générale today reported a 20.1% drop in quarterly net profit to €732m due to a €119m charge for risky debt.
But the outcome was higher than expected by analysts, who had forecast on average a figure of €630m.
The bank said that in the first quarter, net banking income, a key measure of the difference between the cost of attracting deposits and the price of lending them, was €6.3 billion.
This amounted to a fall of 4.3% from the equivalent figure last year but was a 5% rise on the figure for the last quarter of last year.
