PARIS — Société Générale said on Wednesday that it had swung to a profit in the fourth quarter, as it booked fewer one-time items than it did a year earlier.
The French bank also said it would raise its dividend.
The bank reported net income of 322 million euros ($439 million) in the fourth quarter, in contrast to a €471 million loss in the period a year earlier, when it took a charge for revaluing its own debt and wrote down the value of its stake in the Newedge Group.
Net banking income for the quarter reached €5.78 billion, up 20 percent.
The fourth-quarter profit was more than double analysts’ average forecast of €152 million.
Jon Peace, an analyst at Nomura in London, wrote in a research note that the earnings surprise appeared to have been driven by a sharply narrower loss in the bank’s corporate center unit, which includes its real estate and equity portfolios, as well as more favorable tax treatment.
Elsewhere, profit rose across the board, with French retail banking up 10.7 percent in the quarter, international retail banking and financial services up 13.5 percent, and the global banking unit, which includes investment banking, up 4 percent.
For the full year, net banking income rose 4.3 percent, to €22.8 billion, while net income tripled to €2.18 billion from €790 million. Société Générale is proposing a 2013 dividend of €1 a share, up from 45 euro cents a share in 2012.
Frédéric Oudéa, the bank’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement that the 2013 results “provided confirmation of the robustness of Société Générale’s universal banking model.”
The bank’s latest results nonetheless suffered from a €445.9 million fine imposed by the European Commission over antitrust rule violations associated with the manipulation of interest rates.
Société Générale, just one of many global banks under investigation recently for manipulating market benchmark rates, said in December that the events in question took place from 2006 to 2008 and that the sole employee involved left the bank in 2009.
The bank also said it ended the year with a common equity Tier 1 capital ratio of 10 percent, above the coming Basel III rule, a measure of its financial strength. Like the rest of the “systemically important” euro zone lenders, Société Générale is this year undergoing a major review of its financial soundness by the European Central Bank.
Société Générale said it had also improved its liquidity buffer — the assets it can draw on to fund short-term financing requirements — sufficiently to repay the European Central Bank for cheap three-year loans it received at the height of the euro zone crisis. The central bank used long-term refinancing operations to smooth the market in late 2011 and early 2012, offering banks unlimited three-year loans at rock-bottom interest rates. Société Générale did not say how much it received from the European Central Bank.