UBS stock rose on Tuesday morning as the Swiss banking giant announced in a statement on its website that it was launching a share buyback of $2 billion (around €1.8bn) over the next two years.
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The bank said the programme will start on 3 April 2024 and end at the latest on 2 April 2026 or earlier, if either the maximum amount of $2 billion (€2.3 bn) has been reached or 10% of the registered share capital has been repurchased.
"Based on the closing price of the UBS registered share on the SIX Swiss Exchange on 27 March 2024 and the closing USD/CHF FX rate on 27 March 2024, this corresponds to some 64.1 million registered shares or around 1.85% of the registered share capital of UBS. The share repurchase will be conducted via a separate trading line on the SIX Swiss Exchange. The shares will be repurchased for the purpose of a capital reduction," UBS said.
It comes after the bank suspended its last buyback programme a year ago following its rescue deal of former rival bank Credit Suisse, an integration that is still ongoing.
Shares in UBS were up 0.76% at 27.93 CHF, at the time of writing. The stock hit a 16-year high last week and has risen about 60% since the take over agreement last March.
As highlighted by the Financial Times (FT), the two-year repurchase plan is significantly smaller than the previous two — $4.5bn in 2021 and $6bn in 2022 — but UBS said it hoped to exceed its pre-acquisition level of buybacks by 2026.
