NEW YORK, April 19: US shares roared higher on Friday as investors cheered earnings reports from Citigroup, Google and other big companies indicating that ongoing financial turmoil may be winding down, analysts said.

The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 192.80 points (1.53 per cent) to 12,813.29 around 1438 GMT and the tech-rich Nasdaq composite jumped 51.21 points (2.19 per cent) to 2,393.04.

The broad-market Standard & Poor’s 500 index climbed 22.07 points (1.62 per cent) to 1,387.63.

Several big companies have placated the market’s worst fears with respect to earnings, Patrick O’Hare, an analyst at Briefing.com, said Friday.

Internet search giant Google set the buoyant tone, reporting after Thursday’s market close that profits surged more than 30 per cent to $1.31 billion in the first three months of the year

Revenue from Google’s main cash source, clicks on online ads, rose 20 per cent in the quarter, mitigating worries that shifting to displaying fewer, better-targeted ads would hurt the California company.

Shares in Google skyrocketed 18.12 per cent to 531 dollars.

Citigroup picked up the pace Friday. The giant bank reported before the market open a first-quarter net loss of $5.1 billion, hurt by at least $12 billion in write-downs amid soured subprime investments.

Citigroup, a component of the Dow industrials, also said it would cut an 9,000 jobs from its 370,000 workforce, in addition to the 4,200 cuts announced in the previous quarter.

Investors cheered the Citigroup news on the notion that the worst of the bank’s problems are behind it, O’Hare said. Shares advanced 5.83 per cent to $25.43.

That issue could represent another wave of problems that would depress earnings for the medium term, the agency said.

Shares in Caterpillar drove 4.85 per cent higher to $82.40. The heavy-machinery maker reported first-quarter earnings of $922 million, well ahead of analysts’ consensus forecast.

Sales jumped 18 per cent to $11.8 billion, of which nearly a third was due to international sales boosted by the declining dollar and robust demand from China.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond rose to 3.809 per cent from 3.729 per cent Thursday and that on the 30-year bond climbed to 4.557 per cent from 4.524pc. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.—AFP