The deal also puts to rest speculation that Citi's big European acquisition would be UBS's Warburg Dillon Read. Even without penetration in the Europe market, Citigroup enjoyed a fantastic quarter. Its profit jumped to $2.61 billion, or 75 cents per share, from $1.4 billion, or 40 cents, in the year-earlier period. The highest analyst's estimate before the earnings were released yesterday morning was only 73 cents per share. That led co-CEO John Reed to joke at an analyst meeting yesterday that today's headlines better read: "1999 was a very good year for Citi." It was an excellent year for Citi's Salomon Smith Barney unit, where profits rose 50-fold to $664 million. Citicorp's consumer banking unit, Citibank, also enjoyed success in the fourth quarter of 1999, when earnings rose 34 percent to $1.17 billion from $872 million a year earlier.