ANZ Banks $7.3B Profit, Axes 3,500 Workers

ANZ announced a $7.3 billion full-year profit on Monday, and the same results sheet shows 3,500 redundancies. The bank booked $585 million in restructuring costs to get rid of those jobs. Net operating expenses fell 7% to $11.1 billion. Somebody's wages are in that number.

Statutory profit jumped 23% to $7.27 billion. Cash earnings, which strip out one-off items like the sackings, hit $7.59 billion, up 31% on last year and slightly ahead of consensus analyst forecasts. The final dividend of 83 cents per share takes the full-year payout to $1.66 per share, the same as last year. Shareholders were still a touch disappointed, because the payout came in slightly lower than expectations.

ANZ shares were down 1.2% by 10:50am AEDT after reversing earlier gains, dragged lower along with the other major banks as the ASX opened down. A $7.3 billion haul, 3,500 people shown the door, and the market sulks anyway. That's the logic of the thing.

Who Has the Power

Nuno Matos, who joined as CEO in May 2025, called the results proof of "significant progress we have made through disciplined execution in the first year of our ANZ 2030 strategy." He said the bank is "on track to deliver all five immediate priorities on time" and to integrate Suncorp Bank by June 2027.

Disciplined execution. The people executed, in the plain sense of losing their livelihoods, aren't quoted in the results. Neither are their families, or the customers who'll deal with whatever a leaner bank looks like at the counter.

JP Morgan banking analyst Andrew Triggs offered the verdict that matters in this world: cash profit was about 1% higher than his expectation. For the 3,500, the sacking was a line item. For the analyst, it was a rounding error in a forecast.

Who Gets Crushed

Net interest margin contracted 2 basis points to 1.53%. Provisions for credit impairment rose to $582 million, up $141 million, money set aside against loans the bank expects won't be repaid. Behind that figure sit borrowers who couldn't keep up. The bank covers its losses on paper, while they face the consequences in real life.

The pattern is plain in the numbers. Costs fall by cutting people. Profit rises. The dividend holds. Those at the top get paid regardless of what happens below.

Casino Rebound

The same Monday brought news from Wall Street, where the S&P 500 rose 0.3% on Friday, the Dow fell 0.5% and the Nasdaq gained 1.1%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gained 4.2% after its biggest one-day drop since April 2025. Nvidia rose nearly 3%, after its worst day since January 2025. AMD, Intel and Micron closed up between 5% and 11%.

The Nasdaq had closed Thursday nearly 12% below its October 6 record high, confirming a correction. The reported trigger: concerns that Democratic victories in Tuesday's US midterm elections would slow the AI data centre build-out. Read that again. Markets lurched over how an election might affect a construction boom for the benefit of chipmakers. Voters were offered a choice between two parties, and investors priced the outcome by what it meant for server farms.

Then came the personal scandal. Nvidia opened an independent investigation after a media report alleged CEO Jensen Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who passed information to Beijing. Huang admitted in a staff message to being unfaithful to his wife. The company will investigate itself, independently, on its own terms.

The Ledger Tells the Story

No workers' voices appear anywhere in the day's market coverage. The 3,500 redundancies come with no quotes, no names, no plans. What the record does show is a bank that cut thousands of jobs and still posted a 31% jump in cash earnings, and an industry whose fortunes swing on who wins elections and which executive is in trouble. The ASX 200 sat 0.4% lower at 8,982 points at 11:30am AEDT. By lunchtime, the numbers were all anyone was talking about.