CitisecOnline profits more than double in 2009

Net profits of listed online brokerage CitisecOnline more than doubled last year after expanding its customer base and due to higher commissions and trading value of its local and overseas operations. The company told the Philippine Stock Exchange on Wednesday its consolidated net income had risen by 154 percent to P269 million from a year earlier. “[The] trading value of [CitisecOnline]’s Philippine operations more than doubled from P16 billion to P33 billion, while [the] trading value of its Hong Kong subsidiary grew by 98 percent from P80 billion to P158 billion," the company said. CitisecOnline has units here and in Hong Kong. Its customer base, meanwhile, grew by more than a third to 8,854 last year. CitisecOnline President Conrado Bate noted that almost two-thirds of their customers were first-time stock investors. “[This] shows that we are not only growing our market share but we are also expanding the investor base in the market," he said in a statement. CitisecOnline had the biggest market share in terms of stock transactions at more than a quarter last year, from 17 percent in 2008. This translates to over half-a-million transactions for the whole year. Its assets likewise rose by almost half to P1.9 billion, while its net equity in Philippine operations more than doubled to P5.1 billion. Its stockholders’ equity, which shows how much the company will have in assets if it went out of business, likewise grew by 38 percent to P949 million last year. Return on equity — a measure of a company’s efficiency to make money — also doubled to 33 percent, which CitisecOnline said was among the highest in the global online brokerage industry. CitisecOnline Chairman Edward Lee also announced the issuance of five-centavo regular and 15-centavo special cash dividends to shareholders of record as of April 13, to be paid out on May 12. — Nikka A. Corsino/NPA, GMANews.TV