Banco Santander Central Hispano (SAN) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call Transcript
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Banco Santander Central Hispano (NYSE: SAN)
Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call
Feb. 4, 2019 10:00 a.m. ET

Contents:

  • Prepared Remarks

  • Questions and Answers

  • Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fourth-quarter 2018 Banco Santander-Chile earnings conference call. [Operator instructions] As a reminder, this conference may be recorded. Now I'd like to turn the call to our chief financial officer, Emiliano Muratore.

Emiliano Muratore -- Chief Financial Officer

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Banco Santander-Chile's fourth-quarter 2018 results webcast and conference call. This is Emiliano Muratore, CFO of the bank. As always, I'm joined by Robert Moreno, managing director of investor relations. Thank you for attending today's conference call.

We are really proud of the results during 2018. Financially, the bank achieved record profit and once again proved to be leading the industry toward the future of banking, improving in various aspects. First, let's talk about the macro environment in Chile and what we expect for this year. Please go to Slide 4, where we show our economic forecast.

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In general, 2018 was a constructive year with a new positive economic cycle and greater business confidence. This was reflected in the GDP growth of 4% for 2018, driven mainly by investment growth of 6% as more companies invested in machinery and equipment. In 2018, 294 projects were approved by the environmental evaluation service for a total amount of approximately USD 25.6 billion. This should start wrapping up in the next two years.

In the pipeline for the next five years, there are around CLP 60 billion in large projects, which should continue to drive growth. Inflation also picked up during the year, which in an annualized U.S. variation of 2.8%, within the tolerance of the Central Bank, which targets an inflation of 3%. As expected, the Central Bank increased interest rate in the fourth quarter of 2018 to 2.75%.

They recently increased the rate again by 25 basis points, and we should expect further increases in the year. The velocity of this increase in rate should be slower than previously forecasted as inflation expectations have came down to four in 2018 -- in 2019, especially in the first quarter of this year. We believe interest rate should only rise once more this year to 3.25% and U.S. inflation to reach 2.5% in 2019.