Southern Missouri Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMBC) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 25, 2022 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Lora Daves - CFO

Greg Steffens - Chairman and CEO

Matt Funke - President and Chief Administrative Officer

Conference Call Participants

Kelly Motta - KBW

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler

David Welch - River Oaks Capital

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to today's Southern Missouri Bancorp Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. My name is Drew, and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions]

I'm now going to hand over to Lora Daves, Chief Financial Officer, to begin. Please go ahead.

Lora Daves

Thank you, Drew, and good morning, everyone. This is Lora Daves, 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 24, 2022 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 by Matt Funke, President and Chief Administrative Officer.

Matt will lead off our conversation today with some highlights from our most recent quarter.

Matt Funke

Thank you, Laura, and good morning, everyone. This is Matt Funke. Thanks for joining us. We're pleased to report this morning that the September quarter, the first of our fiscal year, provided continued growth for Southern Missouri. Due to the above trend growth in loans as well as due to some deterioration in the macroeconomic outlook required provisioning cut into profitability despite very low charge-offs and continued strong credit quality metrics.

We earned $1.04 diluted in the September quarter, that's down $0.37 from the linked June quarter and down $0.39 from the September 2021 quarter. Net interest margin for the quarter was 3.65% compared to 4.01% reported for the year ago period and 3.66% recorded for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, the linked quarter. The large drop off from a year ago was due to large amounts of deferred PPP origination fees recognized in that quarter.

We viewed - our core quarterly margin is stable quarter-over-quarter and down slightly year-over-year. But if we did adjust for the 92-day quarter in September, we'd be down about 3.5 basis points compared to the June quarter. Average interest earning cash and cash equivalent balances decreased compared to the linked quarter and year ago period and are back in line with our historical norms.