Pinnacle Bank boosted its first quarter earnings more than four-fold from a year ago, beating Wall Street estimates and swelling quarterly earnings to the highest ever for the Nashville-based bank.
Pinnacle Financial Partners Inc., the parent company of the second biggest bank headquartered in Tennessee and the fourth biggest bank by deposits in the Chattanooga market, reported net income of $125.4 million, or $1.61 per share in the first three months of 2021. In the same period a year ago, Pinnacle had net income of 37 cents per share a year.
The results were nearly 17% above the consensus estimate among analysts who had been expecting quarterly earnings for Pinnacle of $1.38 per share.
Buoyed by $2.2 billion of Paycheck Protection Program loans, Pinnacle reported $23.1 billion of loans for the first quarter of 2021, up 13.2 percent from a year earlier.
“We are very pleased with our operating results for the first quarter of this year,” M. Terry Turner, Pinnacle’s president and chief executive officer, said in the bank’s first quarter earnings report. “To report these results right out of the gate provides us even more optimism regarding our franchise and the difference that the high-performance culture we have built makes.”
Pinnacle has been ranked by Edge magazine as one of the Best Places to Work in Chattanooga and Fortune magazine recently ranked Pinnacle as the 26th best place to work in 2020 in all of the United States in all industries.
Staff Photo by Matt Hamilton / Pinnacle Financial Partners on Wednesday, March 31, 2021.“Following two incredibly successful years of recruiting experienced revenue producers, during the first quarter of 2021 we were off to another fast start, attracting 25 new revenue producers to our firm,” Turner said. “Our hiring pipelines remain strong, and we remain optimistic as we seek to produce both outsized earnings and tangible book value per share growth in 2021.”
Revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2021 were $315.6 million, an increase of $11.2 million from the $304.4million recognized in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Despite the improved results, shares of Pinnacle’s stock, which had been up nearly 33% so far in 2021, fell nearly 7.6% Tuesday after the earnings results were announced. Pinnacle’s stock dropped by $6.94 a share to $84.80 in trading Tuesday on the Nasdaq exchange.
– Compiled by Dave Flessner