Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. 4th Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kelly Polonis with Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, Sydney. Good afternoon and welcome to our call. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending December 31, 2019. Before we begin, I need to remind you that during the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about future events in financial performance. You should not place any reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as to the dates they are made. 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 fourth quarter 2019 earnings release. President and CEO Joe Turner and Chief Financial Officer Rex Copeland are on the call today, and I'll now turn the call over to Joe.

All right. Thanks, Kelly. Good afternoon. I also would like to thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter earnings call. As is usual, I'll go over at a high level our company's performance and then turn the call over to Rex, who will go into a little more detail on the income statement, and then we'll open it up for questions. Hopefully, you've had a chance to at least glance at our earnings release. If you have, you've seen that we had a solid quarter, especially given the Interest rate and competitive environment. We earned $1.24 per diluted common share during the quarter, or $17.9 million. In the full year, we achieved the highest annual net income we ever have at $73.6 million and $5.14 per common share. Our performance metrics during the quarter were return on common equity, $11.78, return on assets, 1.44%, Our margin was 382, and our efficiency ratio was 56.11. Loan production in the fourth quarter was pretty solid. You probably noticed that our net loan balances were down about $3 million, but our gross loan balances, which include unfunded commitments, construction loan balances, were up about $34 million. Our net loan balances were up $165 million during the full year 2019, and gross loan balances were up about $99 million. I think we said last quarter and maybe previous quarters that it does seem to be getting a little bit more competitive. The lending environment seems to be getting a little bit more difficult. Maybe credit spreads are increasing. are shrinking on our loan products, and I think all that's still accurate. It's not a dramatic thing, though. If you have a chance, you can look at page seven of our earnings release where we include a table on our unfunded commitments, and really the most pertinent sections are the last two sections of that table, which show what our unfunded construction loan commitments are or Thank you. Thank you. One year was $1 billion and $20-something million, and the other year was $1 billion and $60 million. So we are down slightly, but still have relatively robust loan demand. Our asset quality continues to be really pristine, the best in our history. Our non-performing asset balances went down $3.6 million during the year to $8.2 million, so I guess 16 basis points or something on assets. Our capital continues to be strong, significantly exceeding regulatory thresholds. From the end of 2018 to 2019, our total common stockholders equity increased by about $71 million. I think about $23 million of that was as a result of appreciation on or unrealized appreciation on our available for sale securities portfolio and the increased value of our balance sheet swap, our $400 million swap. But the rest of that relates to just retained earnings. Both value for share increased from $4,198 to $4,229 during the last quarter and from $3,759 at the end of 2018. are tangible common equity to tangible asset ratios, also very strong at 11.9%. And I'm sure you've noticed that we obviously declared and just recently paid our fourth quarter $0.34 per share common dividend, and we announced another dollar per share special dividend earlier this month. That concludes my prepared remarks. I'll turn the call over to Rex at this time.