Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (BBVA) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

April 29, 2022 3:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Patricia Bueno

Good morning and welcome everyone to BBVA First Quarter 2022 Results Presentation. Thank you very much for your interest. I am joined today by Onur Genc BBVA’s Chief Executive Officer and Rafael Salinas, Group’s Chief Financial Officer. As in previous quarters, Onur will start reviewing the group figures followed by Rafa, who will go through the business results. Then, we will move straight to the live Q&A session.

Now, I will turn it over to Onur.

Onur Genc

Thank you, Patricia. Good morning to everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining BBVA’s first quarter ‘22 results audio webcast. Let’s jump into it. Starting with Slide #3, outstanding evolution in our view of our results this quarter, on the left hand side of the slide, you can see our net attributable profit evolution, the highest quarterly recurrent profits ever, reaching €1.651 billion. This is 60% above the results of the same quarter last year and 23% higher than the results of the fourth quarter of 2021. And as you can see with – or you will be seeing, one of the highlights of his quarter is the fact that this is across the board, so we are seeing a positive evolution in all business units.

And our earnings per share at the bottom of the page on the right hand – on the left hand side, these excellent results, they bring our earnings per share up to €0.24. Let me note also on this page that on the right hand side of the slide, our strong capital ratio at 12.70%, well above our target range, as you all know and well above our regulatory requirements. It has decreased 5 basis points in the quarter, absorbing 10 basis points from the stake increase in Neon in Brazil and also, considering the very strong quarterly loan growth of 4% as we will be discussing in the next slides. Just one quick note on this, for comparison purposes, the figures. 2021, first half, in terms of comparison, it excludes non-recurring impacts, more specifically, the U.S. business sold to PNC and also the restructuring program in Spain.

Moving now to Page #4, our tangible book value per share plus dividends closed at €6.93, a 12.6% increase year-over-year and 4.1% in the quarter. And regarding profitability, we have strongly improved on our profitability metrics, reaching, in my view, an excellent 15.1% in ROE and 15.9% in return on tangible equity, ranking first in both metrics as far as we can see among our European peers, if you compare their year-end results, this is the best in Europe.