The First Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:FBMS) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call July 25, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Milton Cole - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Donna Lowery - Chief Financial Officer
JJ Fletcher - Chief Lending Officer
George Noonan - Chief Credit Officer

Conference Call Participants

Matt Olney - Stephens
Brett Rabatin - Hovde Group
Catherine Mealor - KBW
Christopher Marinac - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC
Matt Olney - Stephens

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the review of Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Hoppy Cole, CEO. Please go ahead.

Milton Cole

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter conference call. As it's our custom we'll start with several prepared remarks this morning and open up to questions at the end. We've got several team members with us this morning: Dee Dee

Lowery, our CFO; JJ Fletcher, our Chief Lending Officer; and George Noonan, our Chief Credit Officer.

So for the second quarter, we were very pleased with the performance of the company in terms of growth, profitability and credit quality. Loans grew by $111 million, so they were up about 8.6% on an annualized basis. Our markets continue to provide us ample

growth opportunities. We are able to see margin expansion and our margin expanded 6 basis points and our core margin was up actually 9 basis points.

Credit quality remains strong, with only 4 basis points of net charge-offs and 3 basis points migration in NPAs. And although net income was down a little bit, it was down primarily due to the $1.7 million provision that we took associated with the loan growth.

Actually pre-tax pre-provision income was up $800,000 or 2.9%. So again, we were very pleased with the performance of the company and sort of all around.

Dee Dee would you like to talk about our financial performance in a little more detail?

Donna Lowery

Sure, Hoppy. Thanks. And as Hoppy had already said we're very pleased with the quarter and I very happy with all around solid results. But we did report net earnings of $19.7 million, which was $0.62 on a diluted share. That was down $900,000 from first quarter but we did record a $1.7 million provision expense this quarter and zero for last quarter. So that is basically accounting for the difference there.