French bank Societe Generale profit falls 20%

French bank Societe Generale reported on Thursday a 20.1-percent drop in quarterly net profit to 732 million euros ($963 million) owing to a 119-million-euro charge for risky debt. But the outcome was higher than expected by analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires who had forecast on average a figure of 630 million euros. 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 euros. This amounted to a fall of 4.3 percent from the equivalent figure last year but was a 5.0-percent rise on the figure for the last quarter of last year. The bank's shares jumped more than 4 percent at the opening of trading, but fell back to a gain of 2.0 percent at 18.38 euros at 0740 GMT.