Investing.com - Shares in Standard Chartered PLC (L:STAN) tumbled by 12% in early morning London trade on Tuesday after reporting a surprise annual loss with revenues missing estimates and loan impairments practically doubling to the highest level in the bank’s history.
Standard Chartered reported a pretax loss of $1.5 billion in 2015, down from profit of $4.2 billion in the prior year.
Excluding some one-offs, pretax profit tallied in at $834 million, well short of the consensus estimate of $1.37 billion.
Revenue last year dropped 15% to $15.4 billion, coming in short of average forecast of $15.9 billion.
Loan impairments practically doubled to $4 billion, the highest in the financial institution’s history, from the $2.1 billion booked in 2014.
“While our 2015 financial results were poor, they are set against a backdrop of continuing geo-political and economic headwinds and volatility across many of our market,” Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters explained in a statement.
“We expect the financial performance of the group to remain subdued during 2016,” Winters warned.
At 9:19AM GMT or 4:19AM ET, the bank’s shares had recovered some of the lost territory, but were still trading down -3.51% to £421.00.