From Tobacco Warehouses to Myrtle Beach: The Quiet Dominance of Anderson Brothers Bank

In 1933, two brothers started a bank in Mullins, South Carolina by financing tobacco farmers from the back of a warehouse. Ninety-two years later, that same bank is posting a 16.7% return on equity, a net interest margin more than double the industry average, and a stock price that has gone from $23 to $1,000 a share.

Anderson Brothers Bank is not a bank most people outside the Pee Dee region have heard of. It probably should be.

The Numbers That Don't Make Sense at First

A 6.1% net interest margin. That's the figure that stops you when you pull the call report data for Anderson Brothers Bank.

The industry average NIM for community banks is around 3.3%. Most banks would consider 4% a very good year. Anderson Brothers is running at nearly twice that, and it's not a fluke of one quarter. ROA came in at roughly 1.46% for 2025. ROE at 16.7%. The efficiency ratio sits at about 59%, meaning for every dollar the bank brings in, it spends 59 cents running the place. Not spectacular on its own, but strong for a bank growing assets at 12% a year.

Full-year 2025 net income: $29 million. Record.

To put that in context, the bank had $500 million in total assets in 2015. Today it has $2.19 billion. That's 16% compounded annual growth over a decade, and not a single acquisition since buying Anderson State Bank in Hemingway in 2000. Every dollar of growth has come the hard way.

How does a community bank in rural South Carolina generate margins that would make most regional bank CFOs do a double-take? Two things: what they lend, and who they fund it with.

The Tobacco Town Funding Machine

Anderson Brothers' home market is Marion County, South Carolina. This is not a glamour market.

Population: approximately 28,215 people, declining at about 0.5% per year. Median household income: $24,304. Every county in the Pee Dee region recorded more deaths than births from 2020 to 2023. The economic base is agricultural and light industrial: Sopakco Packaging, DMA Sales, tobacco farming legacy.

What that market lacks in growth it more than compensates for in deposit loyalty. Anderson Brothers holds roughly 60% of Marion County deposits. That's not a market share number, that's a lock. When you fund your loan book with low-cost deposits from a market where you've been the dominant bank for 90 years, your cost of funds stays structurally below what banks in competitive urban markets can achieve. That deposit advantage flows directly into NIM.

60% of Marion County deposits. That's not a market share number, that's a lock.

The bank explicitly tracks this. Management describes its retained earnings model as generating 16%+ return on reinvested capital, compounding equity without dilution. That framing is unusual for a community bank. It reflects a discipline about how deposit advantage translates into compounding shareholder value over time.

The Non-Prime Auto Bet

The other half of the margin story is what Anderson Brothers lends.

Consumer loans represent 28.5% of the loan book, a notably high share for a bank this size. The product driving that number is non-prime indirect auto lending, a specialty the bank has deliberately built and maintained. Non-prime borrowers pay higher rates. They also default more. The bank's management is not naive about this: the shareholder letter acknowledges that auto delinquencies peaked in mid-2024 and spent most of 2025 recovering. As of early 2026, past-due accounts in that portfolio had returned to their lowest level since September 2022.

The math works because the yield on non-prime auto more than compensates for the higher loss rate, especially when you're funding it with 60%-market-share rural deposits. Anderson Brothers is essentially running a carry trade that most community banks either can't execute or won't touch. They've been doing it long enough to manage the cycle.

Credit quality across the full book is clean. Non-current loans sit at 0.52% of the portfolio. The Texas Ratio (a measure of problem assets relative to capital and reserves) is 4.16%. Any figure below 10% is considered healthy. The loan loss reserve covers non-current loans at 338%. These are not the numbers of a bank taking reckless risk.

Six Years, Eleven Spots

The story that explains where Anderson Brothers is going is Horry County.

Myrtle Beach is a different world from Mullins. Horry County has unemployment around 3-4%, median home prices around $327,000-$360,000, over $100 million in active hotel investment, and a tourism-driven economy that has grown consistently for two decades. LinkedIn named Myrtle Beach one of its Top Cities on the Rise in July 2025.

Six years ago, Anderson Brothers Bank ranked 11th in Horry County deposit market share among 20 competing banks. Today they rank 2nd.

Eleven spots in six years. In a market where they started as an outsider, against banks that had been there for decades.

That's eleven spots in six years. In a market where they started as an outsider, against banks that had been there for decades.

The mechanism was a dedicated Deposit Task Force launched in 2025 that secured over $100 million from sophisticated depositors in the corridor. That capital funded loan growth in the county. Seven facility expansion projects are currently underway along the Myrtle Beach and Conway stretch. In February 2026, the board approved nine additional leadership appointments to staff the expansion.

The bank also closed a large commercial real estate loan in 21 days in 2025. The industry standard for comparable transactions is 45-90 days. Speed is not incidental to the strategy. It's the pitch.

The Real Estate Question

There is one thing worth watching closely, and it's the Horry County housing market.

After years of pandemic-driven appreciation, the Grand Strand has cooled. Median home prices are essentially flat to slightly negative year-over-year. Inventory has expanded to roughly four months of supply. The median days on market is 116 days, up from 110 a year ago. Seventy-five percent of homes in Horry County are now closing below asking price.

None of these numbers signal a crash. They signal normalization after an unusual run. But Anderson Brothers' loan book is 66% real estate, and a meaningful share of that is in Horry County collateral. The bank's credit quality track record is strong, but it's been built partly in a rising-price environment where problem borrowers could sell their way out of trouble. That cushion is thinner now.

Management knows the Horry County market as well as anyone: they've been watching it long enough to know the difference between a correction and a cycle. The bank's 12% annual growth target explicitly accounts for market conditions. But it's the number to watch in the 2026 call reports.

What 2025 Said About Direction

Beyond the financial results, 2025 was the year Anderson Brothers signaled it intends to be a different kind of bank going forward.

The bank simultaneously deployed three new technology platforms: FedNow for real-time payments, LoanVantage for loan origination, and RingCentral for communications. AI integration is underway across loan collections, fraud detection, compliance, and underwriting. Four new C-suite roles were created in a single restructuring, adding a COO, a Chief Credit Officer, a Chief Banking Officer, and a Chief Risk Officer.

Forbes named them 3rd best bank in South Carolina on their inaugural America's Best in State Banks list, based on customer surveys covering trust, digital services, branch services, and financial advice.

For a 92-year-old bank headquartered in a town of 4,500 people, this is a lot of momentum. The tobacco warehouse is long gone. What replaced it is a bank running margins its competitors can't quite explain, from a deposit base that took 90 years to build, pointed directly at one of the fastest-growing coastal markets in the South.

The Anderson family has been patient before. Thirty dollars turned into a thousand. The next move is into Myrtle Beach.