LITTLE ROCK — Simmons First National Corp. earned $8.0 million in the fourth quarter last year, a 27 percent jump from $6.3 million in the same period of 2011, the Pine Bluff bank said Thursday.
Simmons earned 48 cents a share, easily beating the 40 cents earnings per share projected by four analysts who follow the bank, according to financial-data firm Thomson Reuters.
Simmons shares closed at $25.57, up 49 cents, in trading on the Nasdaq exchange.
For the year, Simmons had net income of $27.7 million, up 9 percent from $25.4 million earned in 2011. That equals $1.64 earned per share in 2012, up from $1.47 per share in 2011.
Simmons had total assets of $3.5 billion at the end of 2012, up from $3.3 billion in 2011.
J. Thomas May, the chairman and chief executive officer of the bank, said in a conference call he was proud of the 27 percent jump in fourth-quarter earnings and called it a major accomplishment.
May attributed the increase, in part, to Simmons’ use of excess capital in two recent acquisitions.
In October, Simmons bought the failed Excel Bank of Sedalia, Mo., from the federal government. Excel had four branches and $180 million in assets.
After taxes, the transaction contributed $735,000 to net income, or 4 cents to the earnings per share, Simmons said.
In September, Simmons bought Truman Bank, a failed St. Louis bank with four branches and $282 million in assets, from the federal government.
Simmons had a good quarter, said Matt Olney, an analyst for Stephens Inc. in Little Rock who follows Simmons. Olney owns no stock in the bank. Stephens says it intends to seek compensation from Simmons for investment banking services.
“The [Sedalia] acquisition helped to boost the results,” Olney said. “I saw some pretty encouraging numbers from Simmons in the fourth quarter.”
Simmons acquired two other failed banks in 2010 - Southwest Community Bank of Springfield, Mo., and Security Savings Bank of Olathe, Kan., in the Kansas City market. It expects to pursue other opportunities for acquisitions throughout the region, May said.
“We have acquired banks in each market with the object of growing them,” May said.
Olney expects Simmons to continue pursuing failed bank opportunities this year in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Nebraska and Iowa. And he expects that Simmons’ efforts to buy failed banks will continue even after George Makris, who has been selected to succeed May as chief executive, begins to lead the bank at the end of this year.
David Bartlett, Simmons’ president, said that Simmons likely will be looking equally at failed-bank purchases and traditional purchases in the future. In the past year, Simmons was focused on failed banks as potential acquisitions 90 percent of the time, May said.
Simmons had total loans of $1.9 billion at the end of 2012, an increase of $184 million from the close of 2011. Of that increase, $135 million was in acquired loans from the Sedalia and St. Louis purchases and $49 million from existing locations before the purchases.
The fact that loan growth came throughout Simmons’ markets in Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri was “very positive,” May said.
Simmons bought back 726,000 of its shares at an average price of $24.24 during 2012. It plans to continue buying back its stock, the bank said. Buying back its own stock reduces the number of shares, which increases its earnings per share and has a tendency to increase the value of the remaining shares.
Simmons has 96 offices in 55 cities in Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas.
Business, Pages 25 on 01/25/2013