Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE:SAN) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 29, 2024 5:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Begona Morenes - Global Head of Investor Relations
Jose Garcia Cantera - Senior Executive Vice-President, Chief Financial Officer
Hector Grisi Checa - Chief Executive Officer, Executive Director

Conference Call Participants

Ignacio Ulargui - BNP Paribas
Francisco Riquel - Alantra
Alvaro Serrano - Morgan Stanley
Antonio Reale - Bank of America
Marta Sanchez Romero - Citi
Carlos Peixoto - CaixaBank BPI
Andrea Filtri - Mediobanca
Ignacio Cerezo - UBS
Sofie Peterzens - JPMorgan
Britta Schmidt - Autonomous Research
Chris Hallam - Goldman Sachs
Hugo Cruz - KBW

Jose Garcia Cantera

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter earnings presentation. Like always, the presentation will start with our CEO, with Hector Grisi's comments, followed by my more detailed explanation of the P&L, he will have his concluding remarks, and then we will open it up for questions. Hector, please go ahead.

Hector Grisi Checa

Thank you very much, Jose. Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today's presentation, as always, first, I will talk about our results in the context of our strategy, then Jose will review our financial performance in greater detail, and then I will conclude with some final messages as Jose said, we will then open the floor for all your questions.

So the main highlights of our results in this first are the following: Q3 was another record quarter for Santander, which continues to demonstrate the benefits from the execution of our strategy and the resilience of our business model. Profit reached €3.3 billion, 12% above the Q3 on '23, on the back of a solid franchise of 171 million customers that continues to increase as we improve our customer experience through simplification, automation and leverage of our global platforms.

Profit reached €9.3 billion in the first nine months, also a record of 14%, supported by strong customer revenue growth across regions and all the global businesses. We achieved this as we invest for the future, and we continue to make excellent progress towards a simpler and more integrated model, which has helped us to improve our efficiency by 229 basis points and increased our RoTE to 16.2%.

Finally, our balance sheet remained solid with a sound capital ratio and robust credit quality and contributed to the strong profitable growth, shareholder value creation, and attractive remuneration. Dividend per share increased by 14% and the cash dividend per share will be 39% higher in '24.