Banco Santander SA (SAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 2, 2023 4:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Begona Morenes

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Banco Santander's conference call to discuss our financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022. Just as a reminder, both the results report and presentation we will be following today are available to you on our website.

I'm joined here today by our Executive Chairman, Ms. Ana Botín; and our CEO, Mr. Héctor Grisi. Following their presentations, we will open the floor for any and all questions you may have in the Q&A session.

Before I hand over the floor to Ms. Botín, let me remind you that on February 28, Santander Investor Day will take place in London where our top management team will present the group's strategy and mid-term outlook and plans. You can find all relevant information on how to register on our corporate website in case you have not done so already. We look forward to your participation.

With this, I will hand over to Mr. Botín. Ana, the floor is yours.

Ana Botin

So thank you, Begoña, and good morning to everybody. Thanks for joining us. So 2022 was marked by the tragic return of war to Europe. It has not been an easy year and certainly very different to what we all expected 12 months ago. Clearly, this has impacted, in a big way, the economic and macro environment. I believe we're in a new era that these conditions of high inflation and higher rates will be here for a while.

Central bank, of course, tightening monetary policy, increased rates. Remember, we had 6 years of negative rates in Europe and quite a few years in the U.S. The result of all of this is that we have a lot more uncertainty, and Santander has shown with the results we published today that we are well prepared to deal with this. We're actually quite accustomed to dealing inflationary environments for many years, including the last ones, of course, in Latin America.

We delivered record results, and -- I want to stress, and achieved our 2022 commitments that we set before the war in Ukraine started. This is thanks to our customer focus, our scale, both in market and global, and this is what's driving the profitable growth that you have seen. We actually increased loans by -- and deposits by nearly EUR 140 billion. We welcomed 7 million new customers to the bank. We increased revenues and profits by double digit. This is a record profit. And I want to stress also that most of this increase is driven by the improvements in the operational model that we have been executing. And profitability, of course, increased again with a RoTE of 13.4% and a strong EPS growth of 23% in the year.