Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce benefited from growth in its domestic retail business even as it set aside more money than analysts expected for potentially sour loans.
Revenue climbed 10% at the company's Canadian business, and net interest income — the difference between what the bank makes from lending and what it pays for deposits — was up 13%, the Toronto-based bank said in a statement Thursday. Provisions for credit losses totaled C$585 million ($431 million), slightly more than the C$583.4 million analysts had forecast.
The increase in provisions reflects the "current economic environment, particularly in the U.S. office and Canadian consumer portfolios," the bank said in a shareholder presentation. Write-offs were higher for credit cards and personal lending in its domestic portfolio, and CIBC said it increased provisions in its U.S. business due to stress in the real estate and construction sectors.
All of the five biggest Canadian banks reported first-quarter results this week that were affected by higher provisions for loan losses as elevated interest rates continue to hurt credit quality and missed payments begin to mount.
At CIBC, earnings came in at C$1.81 per share on an adjusted basis in the three months through January, compared with C$1.94 a year earlier. Revenue was up 5.4% from a year earlier to C$1.56 billion in its capital-markets business, with the bank pointing to higher trading revenues in equities and foreign-exchange trading.
"A strong quarter overall for CIBC at first look driven by top-line strength and manageable credit costs with most of the bank's operating segments exceeding our expectations," Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts Mike Rizvanovic and Abhilash Shashidharan said in a note to clients.
CIBC's shares climbed 1.2% to C$63.60 at 9:49 a.m. in Toronto. They are little changed this year, compared with a 2.9% decline for the S&P/TSX Commercial Banks Index. Just after noon, the shares were trading at $63.81.
The lender has been an outlier among its rivals in terms of keeping costs down, according to analysts. CIBC said Thursday that noninterest expenses for the first quarter totaled C$3.47 billion, down 22% from a year earlier.
CIBC has a higher exposure to the U.S. office space than its peers, and analysts have been closely watching that part of its loan book for signs of weakness.
While the average loan to value at origination in the U.S. office market was 60%, "values have dropped significantly due to sector headwinds," CIBC said in a shareholder report Thursday. "We are closely monitoring this portfolio as conditions evolve."
CIBC decreased total U.S. office loans by 12.5% from a year earlier to $3.5 billion, it said Thursday.
"We were disappointed with the performance," Chief Executive Victor Dodig said on a conference call with analysts Thursday, noting that the pandemic upended many of its assumptions about the quality of the loans. The bank has since "rectified" the problem, he said. "That issue, as we've outlined, is really in the rearview mirror."
Results at CIBC's U.S. business were affected by a special assessment of C$91 million by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. related to bank failures.
