Beat, raise and distribute... ''For a change'', UniCredit posted strong results across the board with net income 14% ahead expectations. NII was stable, fees were up 11% YoY, costs down 2% YoY. More impressive were provisions, a EUR15m charge or a 1bp cost of risk, much lower than consensus. CET1 ratio was flat at 16.2%, after accruing distributions (o/w interim EUR1.4bn dividends and EUR1.7bn is share buy-back). By units, Italy was in line, while Eastern Europe and Germany were solid. Russia net income came in better than expectations despite provisioning for the trade-finance case. Propelling profitability UniCredit upgraded selected items of its 2024 guidance and still sees upside risk to its targets. Revenues are expected higher than EUR23bn (c.EUR22.5bn previous guidance), with more than 350bps of organic capital generation in 2024, following 1H24 run rate. While these are the only upgraded items in the guidance, messaging was particularly bullish on NII, where the bank sees upside given the wide room for deposit repricing in Germany/Central Europe, but also on cost of risk where the 20bps guidance should be comfortably beaten. Because net income guidance did not change despite higher revenues, and other things being left equal, we believe UniCredit could use its ''outperformance cushion'' to book restructuring charges that will allow costs to be broadly stable over the next three years. The bank was assertive on the guidance''s large upside risk and stated that any new initiative (organic or not, if any) would be widely profitable and not threaten FY targets. We like the winning recipe - Outperform maintained with EUR54TP - European Top Pick Following 2Q24 results, we are adjusting our earnings to reflect the solid trends delivered by the bank in the quarter across most geographies. We upgrade 2024 EPS by 4% and leave our estimates in the outer years basically unchanged after further adjusting the share-count for the buybacks. Hence, our new target...