Citibank CEO (NYSE: C) May Be Overly Optimistic about Growth Potential

Citibank CEO (NYSE: C) Vikram Pandit spoke optimistically about Citi’s future at a company sponsored financial services conference in New York on Thursday, but not all is well at the recovering megabank.

During his presentation, Pandit said that the company’s return on assets will rise between 1.25% and 1.5% in the near future and that the company will make upwards of $20 billion over the course of the next three years.

Although Pandit’s remarks were optimistic, Citibank is still plagued by the group of unprofitable companies that it hopes to shed in its “Citi Holdings” division, which contains $547 billion or about 1/3^rd of Citibank’s total assets. Citi Holdings lost $8.2 billion in revenue in 2009 and $36 billion the year before that.

Pandit’s predictions only include numbers from Citicorp which comprise Citibank’s core-businesses that it has identified as part of its growth strategy and does not plan to sell. Although a $20 billion in profit sounds like solid profits for the unit, the company already made $14.8 billion in 2009. The 2009 profits from Citicorp were drained by the losses from the company’s Citi Holdings division.

During his speech, Pandit said that the company has enough capital to take losses from its Citi Holdings division, but as long as there are billions of dollars worth of non-performing assets at Citi Holdings, the unit will serve as an albatross around the neck of Citigroup.

In essence, Citigroup has taken the businesses that are profitable and that it wants to keep and put them in one division and all of its businesses that are failing in another division. It’s easy for a company to point at the business units that are working well as a group and proclaim success, but until Pandit can turn around Citi Holdings by selling its assets or making them profitable again, Citigroup as a whole will have trouble with profitability.