Earnings Labs

Seacoast Banking Corporation of Florida (SBCF)

Q1 2013 Earnings Call· Fri, Apr 26, 2013

$31.76

+0.41%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Seacoast First Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Lorisa, and I will be your operator for today’s call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we’ll conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note this conference is being recorded. I’ll now turn the call over to Dennis Hudson. Sir, you may begin.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Thank you very much and welcome to Seacoast’s first quarter 2013 conference call. Before we begin as always we direct your attention to the statement contained at the end of our press release regarding forward statements. During the call, we will be discussing issues that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities and Exchange Act and our comments are intended to be covered within the meaning of Section 27A of that Act. With me today are Bill Hahl, our CFO; Russ Holland, our Chief Lending Officer, who is responsible for building our commercial and business banking lines; Rick Perez, who is responsible for consumer banking and wealth management areas; and David Houdeshell, our Chief Credit Officer. We made substantial progress this quarter as you look here throughout the call this morning. Earnings for the quarter were a little over $2 million, excluding credit costs associated with our foreclosed property sales, our pre-tax, pre-provision earnings were around $3.5 million for the quarter. Our earnings for the quarter were also much cleaner as we dropped the charges and other noise associated with a project to reduce expenses and improve our performance. This project was announced as you know two quarters ago and was largely completely at the end of 2012. As a result, our core expenses were down this quarter by about $920,000. Overall, total expenses were down by $2.8 million, or 12.7% compared with last year, and we’re on track to cut $7.4 million or more out of our expense base for the full-year 2013. While we have brought down our expense structure, keep in mind that we’re also redeploying new overhead into growth initiatives. This redeployment has been very impactful on our expense structure particularly last year in 2012 and the impact continued into this quarter. As we…

William R. Hahl

Analyst

Thanks, Denny, and good morning, everyone. Like last quarter and the quarter before we posted a slide deck that provides highlights on our website that we’ll be commenting on this morning and before we take questions. So I’m going to begin turn to Slide 3, and how we are building shareholder value. As Denny mentioned, we had a clean quarter with no significant or unusual items. Net income for the first quarter was $2 million, up from both the fourth quarter’s net income of $240,000 and last year’s $938,000. Net income available to common shareholders was $1.1 million, or $0.01 per diluted common share. The highlight noted on Slide 3 is our improving non-interest income, which is helping to build our revenues in this tough environment. Excluding security gains and fair value change of asset loan, we generated strong growth in non-interest income over the last 12 months with first quarter growth of 20.1%, compared to a year ago, reflecting strong mortgage banking fees, wealth management fees, and increased fees related to our deposit franchise growth, and from our deposit product restructuring late in the quarter, which had a positive impact on both increasing service charges and interchange revenues in the quarter and ongoing. Growth in the non-interest income is also highlighted on Slide 5 in the deck. The strong fee-based revenues resulted in total revenue for the first quarter increasing to $21.9 million, up $361,000 from a year ago. On a linked-quarter basis, revenues increased for the third consecutive quarter, as net interest income was down as a result of margin compression, but non-interest income items were mostly higher across all categories. The franchise is growing as average loans are up $33 million, or 2.7% for the first quarter, compared to a year ago and steadily improving growth in…

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Thank you, Bill, and we’ll open the floor to questions.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Go ahead.

Operator

Operator

Your line is now un-muted.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Operator, maybe tell them, they need to un-mute.

Operator

Operator

If your line is muted on your end, please un-mute your line. (Operator Instructions) Scott Huntington from Bodell is online with a question. Scott Huntington – Bodell Overcash Anderson & Co. Inc.: Good morning, folks, nice quarter. Just wondered, again, I had commented last meeting on this reverse and just wanted to know just what type of institutions you think that a reverse would bring into play. Large cap, I don’t understand. So if you can expand that? I would appreciate it.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Yeah, I recall the question last quarter, and I guess, we just say again that we want to have the ability – maintain our ability to perform a reverse split if we think it make sense, we have no current plans to do it. The reason we are – have that in there is as you all know it brings additional investors to the table that might be otherwise restricted from investing in stock that are trading at a low nominal value. And I think that’s the issue and we’ve probably talked about that in the past.

William R. Hahl

Analyst

Yeah, I just want to… Scott Huntington – Bodell Overcash Anderson & Co. Inc.: We don’t have color on that, when you talk about bringing in different institutions one of cases might be this, so these are the parameters, there is a market capitalization and of course you have the ability to pay dividends or cash dividends are another example. So if it’s a (inaudible) and I think that the reaction has been poor once again, since they are doing well, completely ignoring what is much, much better performance on the part of all the employees there at Seacoast, I mean, it really is a lot of credit to go around. And I could see doing it, your inability to buy – position to buyback shares and after your share is about 20% and 30% after reverse and you get dabble of shares closer to book, but it really sound to see just who you might be bringing in this reverse?

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Yeah, Bob, I appreciate the comments and I suggest maybe you give me a call and we can talk offline and I’d like to kind of hear more of your thoughts and I appreciate the call. Scott Huntington – Bodell Overcash Anderson & Co. Inc.: Thank you, folks

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Thanks, Bob. Scott Huntington – Bodell Overcash Anderson & Co. Inc.: Keep on hammering the way you believe in us and trust your hard work and strong position will be ultimately rewarded. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Enrique Acedo from Raymond James is summoning with a question. Enrique Acedo – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Hey. Good morning, guys.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Good morning. Enrique Acedo – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Just a real question on employee expenses, was there an element of seasonality, I saw an increase of about $490,000 quarter-to-quarter?

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Well, yeah, typically in the first quarter, your taxes and some employment taxes and the like are higher until those phase out. So if you talk about employee, their salaries and benefits combined? Enrique Acedo – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Yes.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Yeah, you’ll see a bump in from the fourth quarter and first quarter almost every year. Enrique Acedo – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: All right. Thank you, sir.

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

Yeah, thank you.

Operator

Operator

And we have no further questions. Do you have any final remarks?

Dennis S. Hudson III

Analyst

No. that’s it. I really appreciate your attending today and we look forward to updating you next quarter on our continued progress.