Good day everyone. Welcome to the BLADEX’s Conference Call. As a reminder today's call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Miss. Melanie Carpenter. Ma'am you may begin your conference.

Thank you. Good morning everyone, and welcome to the BLADEX’s first quarter 2008 conference call on this 16th of April of 2008. This call is for investors and analysts only. And if you are a member of the media, you are invited to listen-only, if you have any questions, please follow-up with our advice after this call. Joining us today from Panama City, are Mr. Jaime Rivera, the Chief Executive Officer and Mr. Jaime Celorio, the Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. [Louis Sampos] from the Central Bank of Paraguay. He is representing the Class-A of BLADEX shareholders and Mr. Rivera, Mr. Celorio following the annual shareholder's meeting that just finished yesterday. The different comments will be based on the earnings released yesterday, and a copy of the long version is available on the website at www.bladex.com. Any comments that they make today may include forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. And those comments are based on information and data that is currently available. However, the actual performance may differ due to various factors, and these are cited in the Safe Harbor Statement in the press release. And with that, it's my pleasure to turn it over to Mr. Jaime Rivera for his comments. Please go ahead, Jaime.

Thank you, Melanie, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As usual we thank you very much for the time that you take, and your continuous interest in the results and the well-being of our company. During the next 20 minutes or so, I will try to provide you with some insights into what has been the market environment in which we have been operating because I think that, this quarter in particular, that is more important than in other occasions. And I would then ask Mr. Jaime Celorio, our new CFO to provide you with some color or for what lies behind the numbers that we just reported. It has been a certainly extraordinary quarter. I don't want to cover every aspect of the operation, as that would take us much too long and use too much of your time. We will be glad to resolve any doubt that you might have regarding both strategic tactics and the results during the question-and-answer period. So allow me to start please by saying a few words about the market environment in Latin America in general, and the market environment within the trade finance market in Latin America in particular, because that is the one that drives the results of our company. On a purely macro level for Latin America and its prospects going forward, certainly for the remainder of this year, we happened for once to be in agreement with the experts and we think that the difficult situation that is being faced in some sections of the financial markets in the United States and parts of Europe, while it certainly is going to have an impact and will certainly be felt in Latin America, it is not going to have a significant impact as previous crises have had on the region.…

Thank you very much, Jaime. I used to have a smile in my face basically with those numbers that I'm going to describe now, but I have a double smile in my face. Thanks very much for your comment. I am very happy to announce basically the results of Bladex. It's basically special for me to be in my first [premier] Jaime mentioned. We've strong results in this challenging environment. So, I really have a contact with some of you and for those of you which I haven't met, I'll be assured to meet them and get to know you very soon and enhance the relationship. I am going to be short in my presentation and divide this in two parts. First, I'm going to mention about the drivers of our results. And secondly, I'm going to give some flavor in terms of the business segments and in terms of numbers that Jaime already mentioned. So while mentioning the drivers, I'm going to mention that during the first quarter, we continue to maintain a very balanced fee growth, asset quality and profitability. And there are five main drivers, the first one being revenue growth. How? Through expanding our prime base and market trust. Second, the asset quality. How again? We got healthy core franchise growth and inclusion of our spreads. The third is balanced and disciplined funding. Again, how? By optimizing our balance sheet. The fourth one is basically our increasing profitability. And again, we are doing this by operating excellence, investing intelligently in the markets and also by investing in talent and infrastructure. And last, but not at least, I want to mention that we have a robust capitalization, and we've been improving also our efficiency level. Now, I'm going to basically describe, as far as the drivers, and…

Ladies and gentlemen, please stay connected, we’ve seem to lost our connection to the main conference. Just a moment.

And.

If somebody is in the line disconnected. We are back in conference. Please continue/

Okay, guys. I will not start again; I'll just follow basically where we were cut down. I was mentioning about the effect in our deposits and I was actually about to mention that we have also an increase in terms of our funding capacity on a line that announced last year from a cooperation agreement that we have with China Development Bank. We have basically a facility that is a medium term facility of $200 million. So we also brought this one during the third quarter. In terms of the asset management division, we have basically strong revenues of $5 million year-to-date, which represent a 3.8% year-to-date percentage, and results as you can see, has been very higher versus last quarter and versus last year and the division has been able to prove that at least couple of quarters has been able to consistent and as of today, we have a track record. In terms of operating income and return in equity. You can take a look at the graph that are in the press release, you can see that basically we have a trend since 2005. And from an expense point of view we have been able to manage a discipline in expense controls. We have an improved efficiency ratio, basically versus the first quarter of last year where we used to have 35% and basically versus the last quarter of ’07 where we used to have 40%. These days we have 32%. The reason why is because we normally have a season with higher expenses during the last quarter, and also because we have one-time event, especially for some accruals that we made regarding vacations for employees during the last part of last year. So, I tried to make a chart. We’ve got to back to business. We’ve got to take advantage of our business opportunities that we see facing along and the increasing spread. So thank you very much everyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be glad to take up any questions that you might have please.

(Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from [Fred Kirby] with EverKey Global. Please go ahead.

Hello.

Please go ahead sir.

A couple of questions for you. One, I wondered, can you just review to what degree do you think it will kind of cyclical play on the trade financing side given that historically spreads came in a lot from where they were in the 90s. Mainly due to foreign bank competition or local competition and given the constraints in the U.S Domicile banks, whether you're starting to see, it sounds like spreads or widening, whether you think they really is a countercyclical story here for you guys as what kind of cyclical really is on the back of the U.S. not as acceleration in growth in Latin America?

Okay. Fred, thank you. Actually I believe it's a bit of both. Clearly, a part of the reason why spreads have increased is because there are now fewer people serving the markets and the market at the time when the need for financing on the part of the market is actually increasing. So we've had a double working in our favor. Again prices for the materials that we finance have increased. So therefore, in dollar terms the same volume necessitates more financing. And secondly, yes, there is the impact of people or banks in the U.S. and in Europe. By the way, some of our main competitors in Europe have decided to pull back while they deal with problems at home. More fundamentally, however, I believe that the lessons of the last six months have brought about what is in some banks a radical change in the way they view risk and return, and the place where they put the minimum pricing thresholds. So to that extent, I'm hoping that this would be more permanent. What we all hope is a temporary certain liquidity situation. The risk and return I hope would be for some time more in equilibrium than it had being in the last four years. Does that more or less answer your questions?

Yeah. That answers my question just a second follow-up. You mentioned what percent the balance is going up on the back of commodity prices, what percent of the trade financing that you are doing is related to unfinished commodities versus and if you could even talk about soft commodities agriculture versus finished good?

I don't…

Yeah.

Go ahead.

And then, finally if could just give us some update. I used to follow this more closely long ago, but in terms of non-performing loans, do you have any non-performing loans, any material at all? On asset quality you mentioned the situation is very strong, but I just wondered if --?

Okay. Now, firstly, your second question is the easiest one to answer. No, we don't have any. Zero.

Right.

Not a cent. On the question of commodities, most of our activity, the exporters, the large exporters that we finance are taking place in South America. So therefore, we are talking about grains, iron, unfinished commodities. The one country where we have, our activity is geared around finished products, of course, is Mexico. 80% of Mexican export represents manufactured good. But Mexico is relatively small but growing part of our business. Most of our commodity exposure relates to sorghum, corn, sugar, aluminum, oil and iron, right.

Okay. Thank you so much guys.

Sure, Mr. Kirby.

Thank you for question, sir. Next question comes from [Anurag Bhagwanji with Porto Orlin]. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, gentleman.

Good afternoon, Anurag. How are you?

Good. My first question was regarding the relationship between spreads and margins. So if I heard you correctly you mentioned that spread is expanded by about 22 basis points, whereas the margins expanded by about eight basis points quarter-on-quarter. I'm assuming this has some impact on increase in liquidity. Is it possible to quantify that impact if the liquidity ratio had stayed where it was in Q4, how much NIM sort of moved up?

It is possible to quantify, we will place it on our website. Clearly, that would have helped. That would have worked even more to an advantage. There was a cost in keeping that liquidity high. We'll calculate the number and we'll place it in our website, probably tomorrow. Would that be sufficient for you?

Absolutely fine, Mr. Rivera. And my second question was, did I hear that correctly Mr. Celorio mentioning that OCI account as of now has gone back to where it was on 31 December, is that correct?

It is correct.

Okay. So it's now negative 10 million?

Negative 10 million on our portfolio, which is much larger.

Sure. That's very helpful.

Okay.

Thanks a lot gentleman and all the best.

Anurag, no, and by the way, our bet off course, it's not our bet, our belief is that when investor start buying again, the first thing they're going to do is buy some of the type of assets that we have in that portfolio. Prices don't have to move up much before we realize significant gains on that. My only question is, will that take one quarter or one year? And in the end it doesn't really matter because in the mean time we're making very good money on it.

Yeah. As long as you have that sort of holding capacity that you do have, you really don't know how much of what you should have.

That's correct. It's like to have a 19% or 20% Tier 1 ratio, one-year engaged in this.

Yeah. Thanks a lot Mr. Rivera.

Sure. You're welcome.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Jeremy Hellman with Singular Research. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everybody.

Good morning, Jeremy. How are you?

Very good. I wanted to talk a little bit about the asset management business and your external fund raising. Is that by designing you did not disclose the amount of investment that you're going to be picking up in May?

It is by design. We want to have --.

It is our funds in Europe. It will probably start small, but I'm happy and we're happy, because the name is an important name, and like anything else, in every business I think, the first step is probably the most important one to take. We went on a tour in Europe and came back with one investor. That to us was a good start.

(Operator Instructions) There are no further questions in the queue at this point.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for having participated in the call. I'm actually quite happy and very excited about the way things went during the quarter. And as I hope I've transmitted to you, we're very excited about the prospect for the company going forward. The start, both the ones that we have failed and the ones that we don't control are aligned for the company in probably the best way they have been in at least four years. In fact, in my perspective as a CEO, I believe that this quarter demonstrates and it's a combination of the first phase of the transformation that we started working on four years ago when we started off, and remember this is where we started off, a completely monoline, mono-client type of institution. All we used to do, less than four years ago, in fact, was finance banks through simple short-term loans. We've come a long way from that. And I think that the result of this quarter demonstrate that. Two things: firstly, we have the right strategy; and secondly and perhaps more importantly that we know how to execute. With ups and downs, the motto has become self-sustaining. I believe that if the situation in the market holds, the prospects for the company over the short and even medium term in terms of improving profitability are solid. We are, of course, not satisfied with where we are at 12% ROE. It's certainly a lot better than it used to be in the past and making $20 million a quarter is a lot more than the $7 million or $8 million a quarter that we were making two years ago. It's still however not where we want the company to be. So, we're already working on the next phase,…

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may now disconnect.