Citigroup Inc. (C)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
January 19, 2010 11:00 a.m. ET

Executives

John Andrews - Head of Investor Relations
Vikram Pandit – Chief Executive Officer
John Gerspach – Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Guy Moszkowski - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Glenn Schorr - UBS
Matthew O''Connor - Deutsche Bank
Betsy Graseck - Morgan Stanley
Michael Mayo - CLSA
James Mitchell - Buckingham Research
John McDonald – Sanford C. Bernstein
Edward Najarian - ISI Group
Chris Kotowski - Oppenheimer & Company
Moshe Orenbuch - Credit Suisse
Carole Berger - Luna Analytics Securities

Presentation

Operator

Hello and welcome to Citi’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2009 earnings review with Chief Executive Officer, Vikram Pandit and Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach. Today''s call will be hosted by John Andrews, Head of Citi Investor Relations.

We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks at which time you will be given instructions for the question-and-answer session. Also as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time.

Mr. Andrews, you may begin.

John Andrews

Thank you, operator. Good morning to everybody and thank you for joining us this morning. On our call today our CEO, Vikram Pandit, will speak first, followed by John Gerspach, our CFO, who will take you through the earnings presentation which is available on our website for those who don''t have it yet, Citigroup.com. Afterwards, we will be happy to take your questions.

Before we get started, I would like to remind you that today''s presentation may contain forward-looking statements. Citi''s financial results may differ materially from these statements so please refer to our SEC filings for a description of the factors that could cause our actual results to differ from expectations.

With that said, let me turn it over to Vikram.

Vikram Pandit

John, thank you very much and thank you all for joining us this morning. We will take you through the fourth-quarter results today. We will put those in context of the entire 2009 and then we will also touch on 2010.

Let me start by saying that we made enormous progress in 2009. We built financial strength. Capital, liquidity and reserves are all very strong. We reduced the size of the company substantially. We focused the company on a clear strategy based on our distinctive strengths. We created Citicorp to execute on that strategy and created Citi Holdings to be rationalized.

We put the right management and leadership in place and have restructured many of our businesses. We have completely overhauled risk management and we repaid the government. As a result of all of these steps, Citigroup had managed revenues of $91 billion for the entire year. Costs of $48 billion for the year reflecting a reduction of $13 billion from the peak run rate in fourth quarter ''07.

Headcount is down from 375,000 at the peak in 2008 to 265,000 at the end of 2009 and assets are down $502 billion from their peak in 2008. Citi Holdings reduced its assets by $168 billion in 2009 and by $351 billion over the last two years and we completed 23 divestitures.

In Citicorp, we had record securities and banking revenues in 2009, record results for GTS in 2009, increasing deposits of $62 billion in 2009. So we enter 2010 with a very strong foundation as a result of the work done in 2009 with a strong franchise and powerful operating businesses in Citicorp. Some credit fundamentals appear to be stabilizing particularly internationally, but US consumer credit remains an issue.