First Hawaiian, Inc. (NASDAQ:FHB) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call January 26, 2024 1:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Kevin Haseyama - IR Manager

Robert Harrison - Chairman, President & CEO

James Moses - CFO

Lea Nakamura - Chief Risk Officer

Conference Call Participants

Steven Alexopoulos - JPMorgan

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler

Timur Braziler - Wells Fargo

Kelly Motta - KBW

Christian DeGrasse - Goldman Sachs

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the First Hawaiian, Inc. Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kevin Haseyama, Investor Relations Manager.

Kevin Haseyama

Thank you, Josh, and thank you, everyone for joining us as we review our financial results for the fourth quarter of 2023. With me today are Bob Harrison, Chairman, President and CEO; Jamie Moses, Chief Financial Officer; and Lea Nakamura, Chief Risk Officer. We have prepared a slide presentation that we will refer to in our remarks today. The presentation is available for downloading and viewing on our website at fhb.com in the Investor Relations section.

During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. So please refer to Slide 1 for our safe harbor statement. We may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The appendix to this presentation contains reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measurements to the most directly comparable GAAP measurements.

And now, I'll turn the call over to Bob.

Robert Harrison

Good morning, everyone. I'll start with a quick overview of the local economy. Overall, Hawaii has been resilient in spite of some headwinds. State payrolls were improving at a modest pace prior to the Maui wildfires, but we're certainly impacted by that disaster. Nevertheless, statewide (ph) unemployment rate remains low. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for December was 2.9% compared to the national unemployment rate of 3.7%.

The visitor industry has performed well on a year-to-date basis with the Maui visitor industry recovering faster than expected and visitors to the rest of the state reaching record levels. Through November, total visitor arrivals were 5% higher than last year and total spend was 6.2% higher. Arrivals from Japan continued to increase with year-to-date arrivals at 506,000, up over 220% from the prior year.