JPMorgan Results Soured by Consumer Weakness

Updated for latest share price, add links.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- JPMorgan Chase's(JPM) healthy results in its investment banking unit helped it easily top Wall Street's quarterly profit expectations Friday, but two of its seven businesses reported a loss for the fourth quarter.

JPMorgan Chase earned $3.3 billion, or 74 cents a share, for the final three months of 2009. Revenue totaled $25.2 billion for the quarter, falling short of expectations. The average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters was for a profit of 61 cents a share in the December period on revenue of $27.02 billion.

JPMorgan said its investment banking unit posted a profit of $1.9 billion for the quarter, nearly two-thirds its total earnings for the period, as the company racked up fees from equity and debt underwriting activities and advisory services. The investment banking unit also includes the company's fixed income markets business, which posted revenue of $2.7 billion during the period, a sequential decline from the third quarter that JPMorgan attributed to "lower overall volumes and tighter spreads across products."

"We are gratified that we generated earnings of $3.3 billion for the fourth quarter and nearly $12 billion for the year," Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in a statement. "Though these results showed improvement, we acknowledge that they fell short of both an adequate return on capital and the firm's earnings potential."

While the investment bank continued to outperform, JPMorgan Chase's retail financial services and card services business lines both reported quarterly net losses of $399 million and $306 million, respectively.