The First Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:FBMS) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 26, 2023 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Hoppy Cole – Chief Executive Officer
Dee Dee Lowery – Chief Financial Officer
George Noonan – Chief Credit Officer
J.J. Fletcher – Chief Lending Officer
Conference Call Participants
Will Jones – KBW
Kevin Fitzsimmons – D.A. Davidson
Brett Rabatin – Hovde Group
Matt Olney – Stephens
Hoppy Cole
[Call Starts Abruptly] I'll give a few high level highlights of the quarter and then turn it over to other members of our teams in their respective areas. This morning I've got Dee Dee Lowery, our CFO with us; George Noonan, our Chief Credit Officer, and J.J. Fletcher, our Chief Lending Officer.
Generally, the quarter we thought was a solid quarter given what everyone knows, a very difficult operating environment. We had talked last quarter about some of the seasonality of our deposits as some of the loan growth we expected and some of that materialized this quarter.
Our GAAP net income for the quarter increased 2.5% to $24.4 million. However, operating income decreased $2.8 million or 10% due to some one-time items that were associated with the GAAP net income increase.
Core net interest margin compressed about 16 basis points and we talked about that last quarter that we felt like there'd be some compression the back half of the year. As many of you know, we have a seasonal deposit portfolio in terms of our public monies, and so part of that is that and also we felt like we have to be a bit more aggressive on deposits given what we thought would be our loan growth profile for the quarter, and that did materialize. So loans grew $78.9 million or 6.3% on annualized basis for the quarter, and J.J. will give us more color on that during his part of the presentation.
Our credit metrics remain really strong with low pass dues, low non-performers, low charge-offs. George will talk about some of the credit quality indicators and metrics and dig into some detail in the credit administration portion of our meeting this morning. We also, during the quarter received a $6.2 million grant from CDFI Fund Economic Recovery Program brand and that's COVID relief monies to further our CDFI and CRA investments in some of the more impacted markets from COVID around the Southeast.
And then finally, if you look back over the last 12 months or so, we've been able to grow actually, over the last 12 months we've been able to grow our tangible book value by over 4%. But given fact that we closed the largest acquisition we've ever done in January of this year $1.7 billion of the Heritage Southeast merger. We also have had increased marks on the interest rate marks on the bond portfolio, which would deduct from tangible book value. But then we also increased our dividends 21% from $0.76 to $0.92 last quarter. So given all that, we're pretty pleased with the fact we were able to even continue to grow our tangible book value over the last 12 months.