Foreign Trade Bank of Latin America Inc (BLX) 2021 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bladex's Fourth Quarter 2021 Conference call on this 22nd day of February, 2022. This call is being recorded and is for investors and analysts only. If you are a member of the media you are invited to listen only.

Bladex has prepared a PowerPoint presentation to accompany their discussion. It is available through the webcast and on the bank's corporate website at www.bladex.com.

Joining us today are Mr. Jorge Salas, Chief Executive Officer; and Mrs. Ana Graciela de Mendez, Chief Financial Officer. Their comments will be based on the earnings release, which was issued earlier today and is available on the corporate website.

The following statement is made pursuant to the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements described in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

In these communications, we will make certain statements that are forward-looking, such as statements regarding Bladex's future results, plans and anticipated trends in the markets affecting its results and financial condition. These forward-looking statements are Bladex's expectations on the day of the initial broadcast of this conference call, and Bladex does not undertake to update these expectations based on subsequent events or knowledge.

Various risks, uncertainties and assumptions are detailed in the bank's press releases and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should any of our underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may differ significantly from results expressed or implied in these communications.

And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Mr. Salas for his presentation.

Thank you, Chelsea, and good morning, everyone. I'm here today with our CFO, Annie Mendez; our Chief Commercial Officer, Sam Canineu and a few other members of the executive team. Today, we will discuss fourth quarter and year-end results for 2021.

Please let's go straight to Slide 3. So simply put, last quarter was the best quarter for our bank since 2019. Profits were up 28% quarter-on-quarter, 27% year-on-year. Credit portfolio continued the growth trend now for the 6th consecutive quarters.

In Q4, the commercial portfolio grew 6% from previous quarter, and that's 24% year-on-year. Lending spreads also increased by 8 basis points, while funding costs remained stable. Our fee income was 30% higher than the previous quarters, basically driven by our loan syndications and letters of credit business. All this while operating expenses and credit quality remained under control.

Annie will later comment on dividends and no surprises there. And on the stock repurchase program that was completed last year. But the real question is, of course, what exactly is behind this positive trend and whether it is sustainable going forward in the current environment? We'll be addressing that too later in this presentation.

Moving on to Slide 4, in this slide, we show the usual waterfall graph that illustrates the fast turnover of our portfolio during the quarter. In this quarter, Q4, we had more than $4.3 billion in credits maturing and we were able to disburse $4.7 billion, that's more than 70% of our book in one single quarter.

Last quarter was the biggest quarterly disbursement since the second quarter of 2018. There are a couple of important insights that are not captured in this graph. First, almost $1 billion of those $4.7 billion is very short-term financing, basically generated through our vendor finance and our commodity -- in the commodity sector, so Bladex's core trade finance business at its best.

Second, there are 2 main reasons why despite the relative high impact of this short-term financing, margins increased by 13 basis points on new disbursements. One, we originated over $500 million in medium-term deals with approximately 3 years of average size. And two, financial institution spreads in the region increased by 5 basis points on average.

In Slide 5, we show the breakdown of our portfolio, both in terms of countries and sectors. No significant changes here. Most of our growth for the quarter was in Colombia with financial institutions and in Peru in the oil and gas sector. Most of this growth is in resilient sectors and short term.

In Slide 6, we illustrate growth of our investment portfolio. During the last quarter of 2021, the bank's investment portfolio grew by $54 million, a modest amount compared to the 2 previous quarters. As these investments are conceived as a complement to our loan portfolio, the bank decided to adopt a more gradual pace of new bond purchases in view of the robust performance of the commercial team led by Sam here and the expected anticipation of rate hikes for 2022.

In Slide 7, we see both assets and liabilities evolution for the quarter, but perhaps more importantly, the trend since 2019. On the left, on the asset side, we saw consistent growth trends in both the commercial portfolio and the credit investment hold-to-maturity portfolio that has grown 10x since 2019. Today, interest rates -- interest earning assets are higher than pre-pandemic levels by almost 10%.

On the right, we illustrate the evolution of Bladex's funding structure. In Q4, we saw a slight reduction of the bank's deposit base, which nevertheless remained above $3 billion. This is a seasonal behavior typical of the last months of the year. As a matter of fact, we have already seen a rebound in deposit volumes earlier this year.

The bank has been making more intensive use of bilateral lines, private placements through its EMTN program and repos to fund the growth of both the loan portfolio and the investment portfolio.

In addition to this, in order to further reimport the bank's funding base in November, we successfully completed a new debt placement in the Mexican market for MXN 3 billion. That's approximately $150 million, which was considerably oversubscribed and followed by a reopening of a similar amount also oversubscribed a few weeks ago in late January.

Finally, the bank has also launched a global syndicated loan, which we expect to close early March. With these new resources, Bladex is well prepared to keep funding its asset growth while maintaining a cost efficient and resilient funding base.

I'm going to leave it here for now and turning it to Annie, so she can walk you through our P&L. Afterwards, I will make some closing comments related to how Bladex is positioned to tackle the current environment, particularly as it relates to raising rates in the U.S. and also in Latin America. Annie?

Thank you, Jorge. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to comment on Bladex's fourth quarter results, starting on Slide #8. The profit for the fourth quarter of 2021 was up by 28% on a sequential quarterly basis and up 27% year-on-year, reaching over $20 million.

Driving these results were top line revenues, up 11% quarter-on-quarter and 18% year-on-year, with a positive quarterly trend on both, net interest income or NII and fee income coupled with relatively stable operating expenses.

NII quarterly growth was supported by higher credit portfolio balances on the back of strong loan origination and the ongoing buildup of the bond portfolio, complemented by a pickup in lending spread, reflecting growth in medium-term lending, as Jorge just mentioned, and higher loan demand on the back of increased trade volumes and commodity prices.

Fee generating business recorded a strong quarter, up 31% quarter-on-quarter and more than doubling year-on-year, as the bank continued on a good performance of its letters of credit business and a solid quarter in its transaction-based structuring and syndications activity after closing 2 transactions during the quarter, consolidating its reactivation during 2021, following a pandemic year 2020 with practically no market activity in this segment.

Moving on to Slide 9. We can see the annual profits evolution, having recorded $62.7 million for the year 2021, slightly lower than the year before, down 1% and still trailing pre-pandemic levels of $86 million in 2019. The main factor impacting annual profit has been lower net interest income, down 6% year-on-year and well below 2019 levels, mainly on the account of lower market rate, hardly compensated by increased average balances as we shortly see in more detail.

Strong fee income was up 76% year-on-year and exceeded 2019 levels by close to $3 million or 17%. These increases are mostly related to higher fees from the letters of credit business, as a result of the bank's focus on enhancing its capabilities for its trade finance products deployment.

The combined NII and fee income effects resulted in an annual increase in revenues of 5%, while expenses returned to pre-pandemic levels, although still slightly below 2019, but increasing by 7% year-on-year.

On Slide 10, there is more detail on the elements driving NII's annual evolution. As presented in the graph at the top left, the combined effect of increased average productive assets, both the loan and investment portfolios, coupled with reduced low-yielding liquidity levels with cash balances mostly invested in the Fed, resulted in a positive net volume effect of close to $20 million when compared to 2020.

Lower market rates, however, have had the most relevant impact in NII evolution, negatively affecting it by close to $26 million year-on-year. So that overall, annual NII was down by close to $6 million in 2021 when compared to the year before.

To illustrate this, in the graph at the bottom left, the bar series represent the average loan and financial liabilities base rate, priced on market LIBOR rate. Both have come down by over 220 basis points from 2019 levels.

During 2020, liabilities re-priced faster than loans, both in 2021, both loans and financial liabilities completed the re-pricing at prevailing low market rates. We also present the all-in rates for loans and financial liabilities in the line series of that same graph; illustrating the rate differential between them both during 2021 has reached the same level than in 2019.

So 2021 depicts a normalized year in terms of net lending spreads after an increase during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, with lower market rates representing the main difference with respect to 2019. This is the main reason why net interest margin that is, net interest income to total average earning assets, has come down to 1.32% compared to 1.41% in 2020 and 1.74% in 2019 as shown in the graph at the bottom right.

On the other hand, net interest spread for the all-in rate differential between average earning assets and financial liabilities stood at 1.15% in 2021, relatively stable compared to 1.13% in 2020 and 1.19% in 2019. The fact is that as the majority of the bank's assets and liabilities re-priced in a very short tenor, market rate variations impact the yield of equity invested in productive assets with the full effect in place once the re-pricing in both sides of the balance sheet have finalized.

Moving on to Slide 11. The evolution of asset quality and allowances for credit losses continues to reflect the bank's high-quality credit exposure in its commercial and investment portfolio. Provisions for credit losses during the quarter amounted to $0.2 million for a total of $2.3 million during the year 2021, mostly related to credit portfolio growth and also reflecting the bank's sound asset quality with close to 0% in NPLs and the remaining exposure performing well.

During 2021, the bank reduced its IFRS 9 Stage 2 credits, representing loans with increased risk since origination to a level of 2% of total credit, down from 6% a year ago. These credits mostly related to exposures in countries and sectors, downgraded by the bank at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, classified as high risk at the time.

These exposures have been consistently reduced over time as they were able to sort out the effects of the pandemic. The remaining exposure at year-end 2021 accounting for 98% of total credit is categorized as Stage 1 or low risk, with credit provisions calculated for 1 year expected losses as opposed to lifetime in Stages 2 and 3.

Finally, on Slide 12, we present several aspects with respect to the bank's capital levels and capital management. At year-end 2021, Basel III Tier 1 capitalization, considering the bank's credit loss history through the advanced internal-based ratings approach or IRB remained solid at 19.1%, also strong and well above the regulatory minimum of 8% to the capital adequacy ratio of 15.6% calculated under Panama's Banking Regulators metrics, which considers the Basel standardized approach for credit risk-weighted assets calculation.

The Board recently declared a quarterly dividend of $0.25 per share, stable from preceding quarters and representing 46% of quarterly earnings. In addition, towards year-end, Bladex completed its open market stock repurchase program for a total of $60 million under the SEC Rule 10b-18 through which a total of 3.6 million Class E common shares were repurchased at prevailing market prices, resulting in a volume weighted average price of $16.86 per share since the program was launched in mid-May of 2021.

So at December 31, 2021, after the completion of the program, the bank's Class E shares listed in the New York Stock Exchange and representing the public float accounted for 77% of total outstanding common stock, down from 79% at year-end 2020. At the same date, Class A shares held by Latin American Central Bank or their designees owns 17% of total common stock, with the remaining 6% in Class B shares owned by financial institutions and which have convertibility rights to Class E shares at no discount.

With this, let me now turn the call back to Jorge. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Annie. Very clear, good job. Let me just share a couple of thoughts on the current macroeconomic scenario and the effects on our bank.

As you all know, in an effort to fight inflation, the Fed has already signaled that interest rates could raise as soon as March. The truth is that aggressive tightening from the Fed has destabilized emerging economies in the past.

The last downturn had significant effects in Latin America. Back in mid-2013, we saw for our currency devaluations that prompted a cycle of tighter monetary policy across the region. This time around, Latin America is ahead of the game. Central Banks, most of them, shareholders of Bladex have acted swiftly and decisively to manage inflation to contain capital outflows and to avoid sharp devaluations of their currencies.

Brazil led the way in 2021 by raising rates in March and others have consistently followed. What we see today across the region are very stable, well-supervised financial systems for the most part, actively and strong -- active and strong support from the IMF and economies that have traction despite the recent increases in local rates.

Not surprisingly, higher rates in local currency have generated an increase in demand for hard currency financing, especially short-term financing, which is exactly what Bladex provides to banks and top corporate in the region that are involved in trade.

The IMF forecast for 2022 is 2.4%, down from 6.8% in 2021. This slowdown is inevitable as the economies return to pre-pandemic levels. Latin America trade flows, however, are expected to grow 8% in 2022 and at least 5% in 2023. This is also good news for Bladex.

So all in all, we remain cautiously optimistic that the region will be able to navigate this new set of challenges. In this context, Bladex has really enabled able to support its clients as we have done for the last 4 decades.

I'm going to leave it there. Thank you, everybody, and we will now open it up for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Jim Marrone with Singular Research. (Operator Instructions)

So my first question is in regards to the net interest margin. You said it stabilized at 1.15%. Can you give us an idea of what you anticipate with higher rates in 2022 and how that will impact the business?

Sure, of course, Annie?

Yes. Actually, the net interest margin is 1.32%, the net interest spread was 1.15%, so slight difference between the two, and that's the effect of the capital in the net interest margin.

Well, we would anticipate the reverse of what happened in 2020 and 2021 if interest rates start to come up. As I mentioned, both our asset and liabilities re-pricing at very short tenor. They're both mostly based on market rate. And we estimate that about over 70% re-prices fairly quickly within the next, I would say, 6 months. And the overall impact at the end will depend on the magnitude of the interest rate increases and the frequency of the increases, because we do run a very short tenor that may be -- I mean, let's say, in the first month, it may be more liability sensitive or neutral depending on our liquidity level. But at the end, in general terms, they tend to re-price fairly at the same time.

So when this re-pricing is finalized over time, the net effect is processed to our net interest margins when the interest rates go up because of the effect of equity financing a portion of assets and as assets increase the yield, then that should benefit the bottom line. I don't know if that is clear enough and if that answers your question.

Okay. I am showing that Jim just disconnected right as you were finishing up your answer. (Operator Instructions) Speakers, and at this time, I am showing no further questions in queue.

We do have a question from the webcast. Is the bank open to further stock repurchases given the current [IOWPB] values?

Okay. Yes, I can take that. The bank through the Board of Directors is consistently and very actively managing its capital position and considering capital initiatives like we did last year with the stock repurchase program.

Having said this, the bank also keeps a solid capitalization given the region in which we operate. And at the end of the day, the Board decides on this type of capital management initiatives, depending on future prospects and in terms of growth for our bank.

So it's really not in our place to speculate on that. It's up to the Board. What I can say is its capital management initiatives are constantly revised at the Board level. I don't know, Jorge, if you want to?

No. I mean -- and yes, and with the recent growth and expected growth, capital rates just have been tightening, and we're still very well capitalized. But we're closer to the average of local market here under -- in Panama under the bank's superintendency ratio calculations. But again, the decision is up to the Board.

(Operator Instructions) Speakers, at this time, there are no further questions in queue.

Okay, then. Thank you very much for your attention, and stay safe.

Thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's teleconference, and you may now disconnect your phone.