← All companies ← THC Manual THG → ← TFSL Banks TMP →

THFF, First Financial Corporation

Banks financial

The Corporation, which is headquartered in Terre Haute, Indiana, offers a wide variety of financial services including commercial, mortgage and consumer lending, lease financing, trust account services, and depositor services through its subsidiary.

Agriculture production loans are typically secured by growing crops and generally secured by other assets such as farm equipment.

Latest annual: FY2025 10-K

THFF · First Financial Corporation

The business

What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.

Revenue · FY2025

$262M

+20.2% YoY · 7% 5-yr CAGR

Vital signs · FY2025, with 5-yr average

Revenue $262M 5-yr avg $217M

Return on equity 12% 5-yr avg 11%

Return on tangible equity 15% 5-yr avg 14%

Efficiency ratio 59% 5-yr avg 62%

Equity / assets 11.3% 5-yr avg 10.6%

Next report By 11/8 · the 10-Q for the quarter ended late September · due within 40 days of period end · has filed ~37 days after · the wire records it on arrival

The business in brief

read the 10-K →

What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.

What moves the needle: Net interest margin, loan losses, and book value. A lender is read on the quality of its balance sheet, not an earnings multiple, and the worst year of credit losses matters more than the best. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on pricing power & competition, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
Is it a good business?: Return on equity has sat below the cost of equity (median 9%, above 12% in only 2 of 10 years). It runs at a 59% efficiency ratio, lean. The cycle and the loan book decide this one; weigh the recession years in the record, not the average, and read the 10-K.

Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.

The record

Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.

The record, 2016–2025

realized figures from each filing · older years to the left

2016’16	2017’17	2018’18	2019’19	2020’20	2021’21	2022’22	2023’23	2024’24	2025’25
										Income statement
$152M	$144M	$155M	$170M	$189M	$185M	$212M	$210M	$218M	$262M	RevenueRevenue
$109M	$114M	$126M	$149M	$160M	$152M	$183M	$228M	$265M	$306M	Interest incomeInt. inc.
$4M	$6M	$10M	$17M	$14M	$9M	$18M	$61M	$90M	$86M	Interest expenseInt. exp.
$105M	$108M	$117M	$132M	$146M	$143M	$165M	$167M	$175M	$220M	Net interest incomeNet int.
$47M	$36M	$38M	$38M	$42M	$42M	$47M	$43M	$43M	$42M	Noninterest incomeFee inc.
$3M	$5M	$6M	$5M	$11M	$2M	($2M)	$7M	$16M	$8M	Credit-loss provisionProvision
$58M	$50M	$58M	$61M	$66M	$66M	$88M	$72M	$57M	$99M	Pretax incomePretax
$38M	$29M	$47M	$49M	$54M	$53M	$71M	$61M	$47M	$79M	Net incomeNet inc.
34%	41%	19%	20%	18%	19%	19%	16%	17%	20%	Effective tax rateTax rate
										Cash flow & returns
1.3%	1.0%	1.5%	1.2%	1.2%	1.0%	1.4%	1.3%	0.9%	1.4%	Return on assetsROA
9%	7%	11%	9%	9%	9%	15%	11%	9%	12%	Return on equityROE
6%	−0%	8%	7%	7%	7%	12%	9%	5%	8%	Retained to equityRetained/eq
10%	8%	11%	11%	11%	11%	19%	14%	11%	15%	Return on tangible equityROTCE
59%	62%	59%	61%	60%	63%	60%	62%	66%	59%	Efficiency ratioEffic.
$12M	$31M	$12M	$13M	$14M	$14M	$14M	$15M	$21M	$24M	Dividends paidDiv. paid
$19M	$503K	$391K	$315K	$9M	$42M	$28M	$12M	$376K	$795K	BuybacksBuybacks
($44M)	($27M)	($34M)	($33M)	($16M)	($312M)	($434M)	($22M)	($66M)	($126M)	Investing cash flowInv. cash
($11M)	($24M)	($23M)	$36M	$469M	$288M	($111M)	($210M)	$23M	$73M	Financing cash flowFin. cash
—	($905K)	$281K	$53M	$530M	$31M	($466M)	($146M)	$17M	$37M	Change in cashΔ cash
										Balance sheet
$19M	$20M	$20M	$20M	—	$48M	$40M	$40M	$47M	$48M	Credit-loss allowanceAllowance
$3.0B	$3.0B	$3.0B	$4.0B	$4.6B	$5.2B	$5.0B	$4.9B	$5.6B	$5.8B	Total assetsAssets
$2.4B	$2.5B	$2.4B	$3.3B	$3.8B	$4.4B	$4.4B	$4.1B	$4.7B	$4.6B	DepositsDeposits
$34M	$34M	$34M	$79M	$79M	$86M	$87M	$87M	$100M	$98M	GoodwillGoodwill
$2.6B	$2.6B	$2.6B	$3.5B	$4.0B	$4.6B	$4.5B	$4.3B	$5.0B	$5.1B	Total liabilitiesTotal liab.
$414M	$414M	$443M	$547M	$597M	$583M	$475M	$528M	$549M	$651M	Shareholders’ equityEquity
										Per share
12.3M	12.2M	12.3M	12.9M	13.7M	13.2M	12.2M	11.9M	11.8M	11.9M	Shares out (diluted)Shares
$3.12	$2.38	$3.80	$3.80	$3.93	$4.02	$5.82	$5.08	$4.00	$6.68	EPS (diluted)EPS
$1.00	$2.50	$1.02	$0.98	$1.04	$1.08	$1.18	$1.29	$1.80	$2.04	Dividends / shareDiv/sh
$33.64	$33.83	$36.12	$42.53	$43.53	$44.17	$38.92	$44.23	$46.48	$54.92	Book value / shareBVPS
$30.68	$30.89	$33.22	$35.59	$37.14	$37.03	$31.25	$36.48	$36.19	$45.26	Tangible book / shareTBVPS

Per-share growththe realized rate an owner's share compounded

	9-yr	5-yr
Revenue / share	+6.7%/yr	+9.9%/yr
Owner earnings / share	+10.0%/yr	+6.3%/yr
EPS	+8.8%/yr	+11.2%/yr
Dividends / share	+8.2%/yr	+14.4%/yr
Capital spending / share	+3.5%/yr	+3.4%/yr
Book value / share	+5.6%/yr	+4.8%/yr

III

Quality & stewardship

Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.

Owner’s Scorecard

FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →

Is it a good business?

Return on equity 12%

Adequate

Net income $79M ÷ equity $651M

Industry peers: median 11%

What this means
The bank's north star, what it earns on shareholders' capital. Cost of equity is roughly 10%, so a return durably above that builds value and below it destroys it. One year is noisy; the durability across a full credit cycle is what counts.
Return on tangible equity 15%

Solid

Net income ÷ (equity − goodwill $98M − intangibles $16M)

Industry peers: median 12%

What this means
The cleaner return, stripping out the goodwill paid for past acquisitions. This is the number a buyer of the whole bank actually earns on the hard capital.
Efficiency ratio 59%

Efficient (<65%)

Noninterest expense $155M ÷ (net interest income + fees)

Industry peers: median 61%

What this means
The share of revenue eaten by running costs; lower is better, and below about 60% marks a genuinely efficient operation. A low ratio held for years is the operational side of a moat.

Is it sound?

Capital (equity / assets) 11.3%

Well capitalized

Equity $651M ÷ assets $5.8B

What this means
A plain-English leverage read: how much of the balance sheet is the owners' own money. This is a rough proxy; the regulatory figure is the CET1 ratio, which is risk-weighted and reported in the filing. The point is the same, how much loss the bank can absorb before depositors are at risk.
Deposit funding 79%

Deposit-funded

Deposits $4.6B ÷ assets $5.8B

What this means
Low-cost, sticky deposits are a bank's real moat, the cheap raw material it lends out at a spread. A bank funded mostly by deposits earns more durably than one that rents its money in the wholesale market.
Credit cost (provision / NII) 4%

Low

Provision for credit losses $8M ÷ net interest income $220M

What this means
What the bank set aside this year against loans going bad, as a share of its lending income. This swings hard with the cycle, low in good years and spiking in recessions, so read it across the record, not in one year. Disciplined underwriting shows up as low, stable provisions through a downturn.

The franchise and the credit cycle

Deposit franchise 20%

Solid core deposits

Noninterest-bearing deposits $916M ÷ deposits $4.6B

What this means
The share of deposits the bank pays nothing for — checking accounts that stay through rate cycles. This is the deposit moat in one number: a high share means cheap, sticky raw material for lending; a low share means the funding reprices with every rate move. Buffett's Wells letter is built on exactly this economics.
Net charge-offs $7M

Dollars only — loan base withheld

Charge-offs net of recoveries $7M · the loan-base rate is withheld (the loan book is not cleanly tagged in structured data)

What this means
Loans actually written off, net of recoveries. The rate against the loan book is the comparable figure, and it is withheld here because the loan base itself is not cleanly tagged — a rate on a guessed denominator would be a wrong number. Read the dollar trend against the bank's own history.

All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.

Management, ownership & pay

read the proxy →

From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.

Fiscal year	Chief executive	Pay, as filed	“Actually paid”	Owner earnings
2021	Mr. Norman D. Lowery	$2.2M	$1.7M	$51M
2022	Mr. Norman D. Lowery	$1.7M	$1.7M	$77M
2023	Mr. Norman D. Lowery	$1.7M	$1.7M	$80M
2024	Mr. Norman D. Lowery	$1.4M	$1.6M	$54M
2025	Mr. Norman D. Lowery	$2.4M	$2.3M	$86M

Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.

Insider ownership5%
The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2026 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.
CEO pay ratio37:1
What the chief earns for every dollar the median employee makes, per the 2026 proxy. A high ratio alone settles nothing; some businesses are genuinely top-heavy in scarce skill. A runaway figure is where Buffett starts asking whether the board is doing its job.

What an owner would ask, FY2025

read the 10-K →

How much of the deposit base could leave overnight?
withheld
the filing states its uninsured deposits on a netted basis ("less affiliate…"), which cannot be checked against the deposits line the record carries — withheld rather than shown unverifiedverify →

The questions the record and the charts do not answer on their own; each carries the figure and the place to look.

Peers, Banks

The same industry, side by side on the bank lens. Each column names the period it is read over; the group median at the foot is the line to read each figure against.

Company	Revenuelatest FY, USD	ROEmedian over the record	ROTCEmedian over the record	Efficiencymedian over the record	NII / assetsmedian over the record	Noninterest-bearing sharelatest FY
CTBICommunity Trust Bancorp Inc.	$283M	11%	12%	56%	3.2%	23%
CCNECNB Financial Corporation	$282M	10%	12%	64%	3.1%	16%
FMNBFarmers National Banc Corp.	$280M	12%	14%	61%	3.1%	23%
LKFNLakeland Financial Corporation	$269M	14%	14%	46%	3.0%	20%
THFFFirst Financial Corporation	$262M	9%	11%	61%	3.4%	20%
CCBGCapital City Bank Group	$254M	9%	12%	74%	3.0%	34%
ORRFOrrstown Financial Services Inc.	$252M	9%	10%	76%	3.0%	19%
NPBNorthpointe Bancshares Inc.	$242M	12%	12%	61%	2.1%	6%
Group median	—	10%	12%	61%	3.0%	20%

The price

What a price has to assume.

What the price implies

price / tangible book

A bank is worth a multiple of its tangible book value, and the multiple it deserves is set by the return it earns on that book. Type today’s price; we show what you would be paying against what First Financial Corporation’s record justifies.

Today’s price $

The assumptions Cost of equity 10% Long-term growth 3%

Tangible book / share, delivered3%/yr’20→’25

The justified multiple is (return on tangible equity − growth) ÷ (cost of equity − growth). A bank earning exactly its cost of equity is worth about one times tangible book; the premium above that prices each point of durable excess return. A higher cost of equity lowers the justified multiple for a bank.

Enter a price above to run it.

Price / tangible book—

Justified by the return—

Normalized return on tangible equity11%

Price / book—

Earnings yield—

P/E (3-yr avg ’23–’25)—

Graham’s price gate—

Graham applied the same standards to financial enterprises (Intelligent Investor ch.14): the 15× multiple cap on averaged earnings, and P/E times price-to-book at most 22.5. The gate marks the bargain-hunter’s floor, not a verdict.

Tangible book $536M on 12M shares, a 11% normalized return on it. The dials set the multiple such a return would justify; your price sets the multiple you are paying. It assumes the bank keeps earning that return; a credit cycle, a rate shock or a bad acquisition changes it, which is what the record and the 10-K are for.

Weigh THFF against another business →

Cite: Owner Scorecard, "First Financial Corporation (THFF), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/THFF, data as of 2026-08-17.

Manual order: ← THC its page in the Manual THG →

Industry order: ← TFSL the Banks chapter TMP →