Excluding extraordinary items, AOL earned 23 cents a share.
Before special and extraordinary items, earnings were $64 million, or 13 cents a share.
Excluding extraordinary items and writedowns of assets, earnings grew by 18.8percentt.
Though they exclude extraordinary items, they include write-offs that companies think are best ignored.
The loss in 1969 in cluded extraordinary items of $1,414,000.
A year earlier, also excluding such extraordinary items, MetLife earned $370 million, or 47 cents a share.
"Even when you take out the extraordinary items, they appear to have beat our estimates for operating income," he said.
Profit before extraordinary items was 995 million euros ($896 million), up from 465 million euros a year earlier.
The company said today that profit for 2003, excluding any extraordinary items, would be about $3.90 to $4 a share.
When one realizes the possibilities tropical plants offer, the candy store opens with a selection of weird and extraordinary items.
In the third quarter of 1969, extraordinary items were only $811,000, or 3 cents a share.
