Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (BBVA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 1, 2023 3:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Patricia Bueno

Good morning. Thank you very much for your interest. I'm joined today by Onur Genc, our CEO, and Rafael Salinas, BBVA CFO. As in previous quarters, Onur will start reviewing the group figures and then Rafael will go through the business units. Then we will move to the live Q&A session.

And now, I will turn it over to Onur.

Onur Genc

Thank you, Patricia. Good morning to everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining our 2022 results audio webcast. I hope you have had a great start to the year. So let me just jump into it.

Slide number three. So I'll start with that page by highlighting the outstanding results of the year. First, in going through the lines on the page, we have made significant progress in the execution of our strategy, focused on profitable growth. We are accelerating our profitable growth. At the same time, we are leading the digital and the sustainability space.

We have ended the year having acquired more than 11 million gross new active clients, a new all-time record; 78% of our unit sales have been done digitally another all-time high. And we are also at the frontline of the industry in terms of sustainability. In 2022, we be channelled €50 billion in sustainable business; again, another record.

Second line, we have achieved the highest annual net attributable profit ever €6.6 billion, an increase or 31% versus 2021, which represents also a 48% increase in our earnings per share. Third, we continue delivering on our commitment to profitable growth and value creation for our shareholders with ROTE, return on tangible equity of 15.3% and then exceptional -- exceptional 19.5% increase of tangible book value per share plus dividends.

All of this obviously is allowing us to significantly increase the distributions to our shareholders for a total amount of €3 billion, which is equivalent to €0.50 per share. While at the same time our CET1 ratio continues comfortably -- very comfortably above our target of 11.5% to 12%, as you know, our target.

These highlights are what I would be expanding upon in the coming pages, but just to reiterate, the common theme of all the numbers in this page is that we are growing and we are growing in a profitable way.

Moving to Slide number four; new customer acquisition, so our relentless focus on this, growing our franchise, the healthiest way to grow our business. Our focus on this has allowed us to acquire 11.2 million gross new active clients in 2022, more than doubling the client acquisition that we had five years ago and this has also allowed us to reach at the bottom of the page to reach more than 67 million active clients in stock in 2022.