Woori Financial Group Inc. (NYSE:WF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Seok-Young Jung: I am Jung Seok-Young, in charge of Risk Management. So you asked a question on the PF or real estate. As of the end of last year, in the group, it was about KRW2.8 trillion of exposure. And you can see, it was about 1.7% and versus total it’s slightly higher. And then versus the total loan book, it’s about 0.8%. So it’s less than 1% in terms of the proportion. So you can see that the exposure is not that significant. And particularly, out of the KRW2.8 trillion, guarantee is about KRW1.7 trillion. So you can see that with regard to the risk exposure, the PF risk is about KRW1.7 trillion basically. So in the case of the group, the real estate PF starting from the second half of last year, we’ve been closely monitoring this and managing this with our subsidiaries and especially the real estate bridge loan where the local projects, we’ve been very much stringent and prudent on loan management, and we will continue on with such monitoring and assessment and management.

And with the existing PF, we will be following the policies of the government. And it is for what we were going to do is at the time we will find a way to enable settlement in installments and other alternatives where it can be paid back. And then in the case of the subprime, especially for areas where there are untold loss and where there is a delay in construction. So in the case of these real estate projects that have issues, we’re going to speak with the creditor group to find the way for restructuring or for any other ways to service the debt. So we will be looking into the right responses and policies to respond accordingly. Thank you.

Operator: Yes. The next question will come from DS Investment Securities, . So please go ahead, with your question.

Unidentified Participant: Yes. Thank you. I am from DS Investment Securities. Thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. There are two questions that I would like to ask you. First is, with regards to your capital management plan. If you look at other banks right now, I do think that in terms of the overall stance that they are looking at rather than paying a cash dividend doing a share buyback and try to provide shareholder return in that effort. So from our stance in terms of our cash dividends versus the dividend — the overall share buyback what is the direction that you would be moving and going forward? And how much do you believe each area would represent? And the second is that in terms of your quarterly dividend once the BoD has approved, when would the quarterly dividend actually start? What would be the timing for that?

Unidentified Company Representative: So if you give us such a period of time, if we could prepare and then answer that would be appreciated. Thank you.

Sung-Wook Lee: Yes. So this is the CFO, Lee Sung-Wook. So in terms of the 26% dividend payout ratio and also the 4% treasury share buyback that we’re going to do for this year, in actuality for our investors on the dividend side, there are some that for cash dividends and for long-term investors, some actually prefer share buybacks. So in actuality, we do think that there needs to be an appropriate balance. So around 26% or so would be the dividend amount. And then if we do have more capital room then we are planning to look at trying to increase the amount of share buybacks that we do and a portion of that going forward. And secondly, in terms of the quarterly dividend payouts, this year, it would be newly introduced in terms of our policy.