Financial services company Citigroup has announced third quarter losses.

Citigroup has announced a third quarter net loss of US$2.8 billion (around £1.6bn) – $0.60 per share – with revenues down 23% to $16.7bn along with a significant reduction in employee numbers.

Since the end of the second quarter in 2008, employee numbers were reduced  by up to 11,000 from 350,000 globally, with a total of 23,000 job cuts in the first nine months of the year.

The job cuts, however, fit into Citigroup’s annual plan, and the company reported the losses as “progress” and counted them as one of its quarterly highlights, along with lowering expenses and legacy assets.

Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, said: “While our third quarter results reflect both a difficult environment as well as continued write-downs on our legacy assets, we are making excellent progress on the parts of our business we control, including expense reduction, headcount, and balance sheet and capital management. We expect these improvements will enable us to realise the full earning power of our franchise as the economy stabilises.”

The quarterly results mark the fourth quarter in a row that Citigroup has reported a loss.

Citigroup is a financial services group that claims to have “the most diverse array of products and the greatest distribution capacity of any financial firm in the world”. It manages 200 million customer accounts across six continents in more than 100 countries.