Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:GSBC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 18, 2024 3:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Kelly Polonus - IR
Joe Turner - President and CEO
Rex Copeland - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler
Damon DelMonte - KBW

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in 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 first speaker today, Kelly Polonus, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Kelly Polonus

Thank you, Marvin. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending March 31, 2024.

Before we begin, I need to remind you that during the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about future events and financial performance. These statements are subject to a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results anticipated or projected. For a list of some of these factors, please see the forward-looking statements disclosure in our first quarter earnings release and other public filings. President and CEO, Joe Turner; and Chief Financial Officer, Rex Copeland, are on the call with me.

I'll now turn the meeting over to Joe Turner.

Joe Turner

All right. Thanks, Kelly, and good afternoon, everybody. We appreciate you joining us today for our first quarter earnings call. I would characterize our first quarter performance as steady as we continue to operate in uncertain and challenging times. For the first quarter, we earned $1.13 a share or $13.4 million. Key drivers of our performance included continued moderate increases in deposit costs. Of course, there continues to be significant deposit competition and an expected continuation of lower loan origination volume. Additionally, generally unchanged noninterest expense compared to the year-ago quarter, but substantially down from the fourth quarter were also parts of our first quarter performance. Rex will provide more color on our results in his presentation.

The company's capital and liquidity positions continue to be strong. Total stockholders' equity was $565.2 million as of March 31, 2024. That was a $6.7 million decrease from the end of 2023, which was totally attributable to decreases in our mark-to-market on swaps and available-for-sale securities. We also declared a $0.40 per share common dividend and repurchased 112,000 shares during the quarter at $51.44 average price. Overall, our loan portfolio continues to perform well. It's very diverse, both by geography and by product type. As anticipated in the current operating environment, our total outstanding loan balances essentially were flat, just slightly down actually $3.4 million. At the end of March 2024, the pipeline of loan commitments and unfunded lines increased slightly to $1.2 billion, and that included $680 million of unfunded construction loans.