Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE:SAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Hector Grisi: There is one important point, Marta, that I think is important I didn’t say. I’m sorry about that. The important and the top line what you’re saying, you’re right. And the main problem is the leasing, okay? What’s been happening in the market, we used to get a lot of the cars back, and we used to make a lot of money on the leases because the car prices and the Manheim were up, and we were making a lot of money. And what happened is 2 situations. First of all, people saw that car prices — used car prices went up. So some of the people did an exercise the lease option, and that basically eliminated a huge amount of the profit that we were making on that. On the second hand, what were happening, there were no new cars.

So people basically exercised the lease option due to the fact that there were no new cars to get a new one. So those 2 things hit us hard last year in terms of the top line because leasing is a great profit center in the U.S. So those are the 2 particular things that hit us, and that’s why you look at the top line in a different way. It’s not loan loss provisions. It’s mainly the lack of revenue because of the leases, okay? So it’s quite important to understand that. And just to give you a piece of detail in Spain. As the Chair has said, I mean, we don’t have a huge amount of exposure in developments or anything like that. It’s mainly EUR 60 billion to EUR 70 billion in — around there in terms of mortgages, okay, that is individual mortgages.

And what is important to say is that 75% of those mortgages are on floating rate and 25% only on fixed rate, okay? So the portfolio will start resetting mainly in April through the end of the year.

Operator: The next question is coming from Carlos Cobo Catena from Societe General.

Carlos Cobo Catena: Carlos from SocGen. One is on the ALCO book in Spain. If you could quantify how much of the increase in NII this quarter coming from the top-up in the ALCO portfolio and what would be the existing size and the total target. Also, if you have similar plans for the other Continental Europe balance sheet to grow the ALCO. I think that’s it. I mean the other questions have been answered already. If you could specify — it’s not a big issue, but the double-digit growth in revenues, the target for 2023, would that be in constant euros as well as 2022? Or that would be a nominal.

Jose Garcia-Cantera: Yes, let me…

Ana Botin: Sorry. Let me — just 1 second, and yes, I’ll let you José and Héctor. But I just want to say on the ALCOs that the effect in Q4 is minimal from the euro ALCO. I think we explained in the past, we had a very small position. We have rebuilt some of that, and I’ll let Héctor and José address that. But there’s another issue about the other ALCO is that we have a much higher proportion than other peers in terms of the hold-to-collect — much smaller, sorry, much smaller, which means that this has hit our capital and our TNAV this quarter, but this should come back in the fall. I would’ve been more conservative in how we account for that. In terms of the euro ALCO, it’s still very small relative to a, say, neutral hedge position. So there is space to continue building that. But maybe you want to address that, Héctor or José.

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