Southern Missouri Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMBC) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 24, 2023 10:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Stefan Chkautovich - CFO

Matthew Funke - President & Chief Administrative Officer

Greg Steffens - Chairman & CEO

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler

Kelly Motta - KBW

Operator

Good morning or good afternoon, all and welcome to the Southern Missouri Bank Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator for today. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the call over to CFO, Stefan Chkautovich to begin. Stefan, please go ahead, and you are ready.

Stefan Chkautovich

Thank you, Al. Good morning, everyone. This is Stefan Chkautovich, CFO with Southern Missouri Bancorp. Thank you for joining us. The purpose of this call is to review the information and data presented in our quarterly earnings release dated Monday, October 23, 2023, and to take your questions.

We may make certain forward-looking statements during today's call and we refer you to our cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements contained in the press release. I'm joined on the call today with Greg Steffens, our Chairman and CEO; and Matt Funke, President and Chief Administrative Officer. Matt will lead off our conversation today with some highlights from our most recent quarter.

Matthew Funke

Thank you, Stefan, and good morning, everyone. This is Matt Funke. Thanks for joining us. I'll start off with highlights on our financial results from the September quarter, which is the first quarter of our fiscal year. Quarter-over-quarter, we did show some pressure in profitability at higher cost of funds as well as lower fees tied to loans, mortgage and transaction accounts weighed on results. But for this current environment, we're relatively pleased with those.

Offsetting some of this pressure was lower reported non-interest expense from lower merger-related costs as well as other operating expenses in the September quarter. Despite challenges, the bank was still able to report an 11.5% year-over-year increase in diluted EPS, due primarily to a reduction from the larger provision for credit losses posted in September of 2022. That diluted EPS figure for the current quarter was $1.16, down $0.21 from the linked June quarter, but up $0.12 from the year ago September quarter.

Our annualized return on average assets was 1.2%, while annualized return on average common equity was 11.7%. Those compared to 1.16% ROA and 11.7% ROE in the same quarter a year ago, and 1.44% ROA and 14.1% ROE in the linked June quarter.