Southern Missouri Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMBC) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call July 25, 2023 10:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Matt Funke – President
Greg Steffens – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Andrew Liesch – Piper Sandler
Kelly Motta – KBW
Operator
Hello, and welcome to Southern Missouri Bancorp Earnings Conference Call. My name is Elliot, and I will be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions]
I'd now like to hand over to Matt Funke, President. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.
Matt Funke
Thank you, Elliot, and good morning, everyone. This is Matt Funke, President of Southern Missouri. Thanks for joining us. The purpose of this call is to review the information and data presented in our quarterly earnings release dated Monday, July 24, 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 by Greg Steffens, our Chairman and CEO. And I'll start off with some highlights on our financial results.
We're happy to report this morning that the June quarter, the final quarter of our fiscal year, showed a rebound in what we would call headline profitability as the March quarter had included large nonrecurring charges related to our merger with Citizens Bancshares. We still had some smaller charges related to the merger in the June quarter and some other noise on the expense side, but we also had some benefits in non-interest income to mostly offset those.
Earnings per common share diluted in the June quarter were $1.37, down $0.04 or 2.8% as compared to the same quarter a year ago, and up $1.15 or 523% from the third quarter of fiscal 2023, the linked quarter. The impact from $829,000 pretax in merger-related charges this quarter was approximately $0.06 per common share as compared to approximately $0.01 in the year ago period due to similar charges. Our annualized return on average assets was 1.44%, while annualized return on average common equity was 14.1%, and those are compared to 1.62% ROA and 16.2% ROE, respectively, in the same quarter a year ago. And in the March quarter, impacted by the larger merger charges, our ROA was 0.23% and the ROE was 2.3%.
Net interest margin for the fourth quarter was 3.60%, down from the year ago period of 3.66%, and up from 3.48% reported for the third quarter. The company's net interest income for the three month period ended June 30 was $36.2 million, which is up $8.5 million or 30.5% as compared to the same period a year ago, and up $2.5 million or 7.3% compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2023, the linked quarter. Year-over-year, that increase was attributable to an increase of about a third in the average balance of our interest-earning assets due in large part to the Citizens merger and was partially offset by a 6 basis point decline in margin.