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

Company Participants

Stefan Chkautovich - Chief Financial Officer
Greg Steffens - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Matt Funke - President and Chief Administrative Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler
Kelly Motta - KBW
David Cohen - Private Investor

Operator

Hello and welcome to today’s Southern Missouri Bancorp Conference Call. My name is Jordan and I’ll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] I am now going to hand over to Stefan Chkautovich, CFO, to begin. Stefan, please go ahead.

Stefan Chkautovich

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone. This is Stefan Chkautovich, CFO of Southern Missouri Bancorp. Thank you for joining us today. The purpose of this call is to review the information and data presented in our quarterly earnings release dated Monday, April 29, 2024 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 Matt Funke, President and Chief Administrative Officer. Matt will lead off our conversation today with some highlights from our most recent quarter and fiscal year.

Matt Funke

Thank you, Stefan and good morning everyone. This is Matt Funke, and thanks for joining us. I’ll start off with those highlights from the March quarter, which is the third quarter of our fiscal year.

Quarter-over-quarter, our profitability was down a bit as the higher cost of funds weighed on our margin. But for this current environment, we remain relatively pleased with the results. In the third quarter, we have seen the net interest margin stabilize, although at a lower level compared to the second quarter, and net interest income was slightly above the linked quarter due to a larger average earning balance sheet.

Despite the challenging rate environment and our cost of funds and inflations impact on the – on our operating expenses, year-over-year, we were still able to grow our core earnings outside of M&A costs and available-for-sale securities losses and we have grown our tangible book value over the last 12 months by almost 13%. We earned $0.99 diluted in the March quarter, that’s down $0.08 from the linked December quarter and it’s up $0.77 from the March 2023 quarter, which would have included the Citizens merger charges.