Gräfelfing/Munich, April 20, 2001. Munich securities house MWB reported a markedly reduced result in the first quarter 2001 compared to the the same period last year. This has been expected and already announced by company. Due to clearly lower stock exchange turnover the group"s revenues slid to EUR 2.3 Mio. compared to EUR 16.1 Mio. in the first quarter of 2000. Starting successfully in January of this year, the months of February and especially March were determined by extremely bad market conditions. Therefore MWB group records a slight loss in their pre-tax earnings of EUR -0.16 Mio. compared to EUR 12.41 Mio. in the first quarter of 2000.

In the ongoing business year MWB sticks to their strategy, concentrating on the core business. " We are not going to any experiment in such a difficult market situation" said Thomas Posovatz, Speaker of the board " but will stick to what has been our strength and success in the past: trading foreign stocks. Therefore one of the main topics for this year will be the consequent development of our trading processes. With this strategy the operative result in quarter1 2001 has been already improved compared to quarter 4 in 2000.

MWB AG has been listed on the SMAX in April 1999. It is a leading specialist and market maker now 2,100 foreign securities in Germany. MWB has memberships on the Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart stock exchanges. With its wholly owned subsidiary MWB Wertpapierhandelsbank, it is also active in the IPO and asset management.