← All companies ← UBER Manual UCB → ← TSBK Banks UCB →

UBSI, United Bankshares

Banks financial

A balance-sheet business, read on book value, net interest margin and credit losses rather than an earnings multiple.

Latest annual: FY2025 10-K

UBSI · United Bankshares

The business

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

Revenue · FY2025

$1.2B

+19.6% YoY · 3% 5-yr CAGR

Vital signs · FY2025, with 5-yr average

Revenue $1.2B 5-yr avg $1.1B

Return on equity 8% 5-yr avg 8%

Return on tangible equity 13% 5-yr avg 13%

Efficiency ratio 48% 5-yr avg 53%

Equity / assets 16.3% 5-yr avg 16.1%

Next report By 8/9 · the 10-Q for the quarter ended late June · due within 40 days of period end · has filed ~39 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 8%, above 12% in only 0 of 10 years). It runs at a 48% 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
$495M	$681M	$717M	$728M	$1.0B	$1.0B	$1.0B	$1.1B	$1.0B	$1.2B	RevenueRevenue
$470M	$624M	$718M	$763M	$798M	$795M	$1.0B	$1.4B	$1.5B	$1.7B	Interest incomeInt. inc.
$45M	$75M	$129M	$185M	$109M	$52M	$106M	$481M	$591M	$584M	Interest expenseInt. exp.
$425M	$549M	$589M	$578M	$690M	$743M	$896M	$920M	$911M	$1.1B	Net interest incomeNet int.
$70M	$132M	$129M	$150M	$355M	$278M	$153M	$135M	$124M	$135M	Noninterest incomeFee inc.
$25M	$28M	$22M	$21M	$107M	($24M)	$19M	$31M	$25M	$54M	Credit-loss provisionProvision
$223M	$285M	$327M	$324M	$360M	$463M	$476M	$464M	$465M	$583M	Pretax incomePretax
$147M	$151M	$256M	$260M	$289M	$368M	$380M	$366M	$373M	$465M	Net incomeNet inc.
34%	47%	22%	20%	20%	21%	20%	21%	20%	20%	Effective tax rateTax rate
										Cash flow & returns
1.0%	0.8%	1.3%	1.3%	1.1%	1.3%	1.3%	1.2%	1.2%	1.4%	Return on assetsROA
7%	5%	8%	8%	7%	8%	8%	8%	7%	8%	Return on equityROE
2%	1%	4%	4%	3%	4%	4%	4%	3%	5%	Retained to equityRetained/eq
11%	9%	14%	14%	12%	13%	14%	13%	12%	13%	Return on tangible equityROTCE
50%	54%	51%	53%	55%	57%	53%	53%	53%	48%	Efficiency ratioEffic.
$96M	$121M	$142M	$139M	$163M	$181M	$193M	$195M	$201M	$209M	Dividends paidDiv. paid
$1K	$1K	$101M	$36M	$21M	$11M	$79M	$1M	$1M	$127M	BuybacksBuybacks
$31M	$267M	($873M)	($383M)	$138M	$16M	($3.4B)	$39M	$571M	($899M)	Investing cash flowInv. cash
$375M	($289M)	($67M)	$48M	$1.1B	$924M	$105M	($52M)	($324M)	$650M	Financing cash flowFin. cash
$577M	$232M	($646M)	($183M)	$1.4B	$1.5B	($2.6B)	$422M	$693M	$250M	Change in cashΔ cash
										Balance sheet
$10.3B	$13.0B	$13.4B	$13.7B	$17.6B	$18.0B	$20.6B	$21.4B	$21.7B	$24.7B	Loans held for investmentLoans
$73M	$77M	$77M	$77M	$236M	$216M	$235M	$259M	$272M	$298M	Credit-loss allowanceAllowance
$14.5B	$19.1B	$19.3B	$19.7B	$26.2B	$29.3B	$29.5B	$29.9B	$30.0B	$33.7B	Total assetsAssets
$10.8B	$13.8B	$14.0B	$13.9B	$20.6B	$23.4B	$22.3B	$22.8B	$24.0B	$27.1B	DepositsDeposits
$864M	$1.5B	$1.5B	$1.5B	$1.8B	$1.9B	$1.9B	$1.9B	$1.9B	$2.0B	GoodwillGoodwill
$12.3B	$15.8B	$16.0B	$16.3B	$21.9B	$24.6B	$25.0B	$25.2B	$25.0B	$28.2B	Total liabilitiesTotal liab.
$2.2B	$3.2B	$3.3B	$3.4B	$4.3B	$4.7B	$4.5B	$4.8B	$5.0B	$5.5B	Shareholders’ equityEquity
										Per share
73.9M	97.9M	104M	102M	120M	130M	135M	135M	135M	142M	Shares out (diluted)Shares
$1.99	$1.54	$2.46	$2.55	$2.41	$2.84	$2.81	$2.72	$2.76	$3.28	EPS (diluted)EPS
$1.30	$1.24	$1.36	$1.36	$1.35	$1.40	$1.43	$1.45	$1.48	$1.47	Dividends / shareDiv/sh
$30.26	$33.10	$31.18	$33.03	$35.79	$36.43	$33.42	$35.41	$36.93	$38.75	Book value / shareBVPS
$18.57	$18.00	$17.01	$18.52	$20.82	$21.87	$19.44	$21.39	$22.96	$24.52	Tangible book / shareTBVPS

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

	9-yr	5-yr
Revenue / share	+3.0%/yr	+0.1%/yr
Owner earnings / share	+4.9%/yr	+26.3%/yr
EPS	+5.7%/yr	+6.4%/yr
Dividends / share	+1.4%/yr	+1.7%/yr
Capital spending / share	+2.7%/yr	−4.6%/yr
Book value / share	+2.8%/yr	+1.6%/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 8%

Below the cost of equity

Net income $465M ÷ equity $5.5B

Industry peers: median 10%

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 13%

Solid

Net income ÷ (equity − goodwill $2.0B − intangibles $0)

Industry peers: median 13%

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 48%

Low cost ratio (<58%)

Noninterest expense $600M ÷ (net interest income + fees)

Industry peers: median 58%

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) 16.3%

Well capitalized

Equity $5.5B ÷ assets $33.7B

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 80%

Deposit-funded

Deposits $27.1B ÷ assets $33.7B

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) 5%

Low

Provision for credit losses $54M ÷ net interest income $1.1B

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 24%

Solid core deposits

Noninterest-bearing deposits $6.6B ÷ deposits $27.1B · pays 2.89% on the interest-bearing rest (avg of year-ends)

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 0.20%

Disciplined book

Charge-offs net of recoveries $46M ÷ loans $23.2B (avg of year-ends) · worst year on record 0.27% · allowance held at 1.20% of loans

What this means
Loans actually written off, net of what was later recovered — the realized truth the provisions were guessing at. Graham's rule applies doubly here: the worst year in the record, not the average, is the read, because a loan book's sins are committed in the good years and confessed in the bad ones.
Held-to-maturity marks No loss

Marks are small

HTM at cost $1M − fair value $1M = ($16K)

What this means
Bonds held to maturity are carried at cost, so rate rises open a gap between the books and reality that only shows in this disclosure. The gap never hits earnings if the bank can hold on — which is precisely why the reader checks whether it could be forced to sell: the 2023 bank failures were this number meeting deposit flight.

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	Pay, as filed	“Actually paid”	Owner earnings
2021	$4.6M	$6.3M	$594M
2022	$4.2M	$5.2M	$744M
2022	$2.7M	$3.0M	$744M
2023	$4.4M	$3.7M	$424M
2024	$5.5M	$4.6M	$433M
2025	$6.1M	$7.0M	$481M

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 ownership3.2%
The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2026 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.
Stock-based compensation$13M
The slice of the business handed to employees in shares in fiscal 2025, 1.1% of revenue, equal to 1.1% of operating profit. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.

Peers, Banks

The same industry, side by side on the bank lens. Each column names the period it is read over, and a median resting on fewer than three years carries that count beside it; 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
HTHHilltop Holdings Inc.	$1.3B	7%	8%	84%	2.8%	26%
TCBITexas Capital Bancshares	$1.3B	8%	8%	60%	3.0%	26%
FBPFirst BanCorp	$1.3B	12%	12%	58%	4.2%	33%
PBProsperity Bancshares	$1.2B	7%	15%	43%	2.7%	33%
UBSIUnited Bankshares	$1.2B	8%	13%	53%	3.0%	24%
GBFHGBank Financial Holdings Inc.	$1.2B	13%2y	13%2y	59%2y	3.9%2y	19%
ABCBAmeris Bancorp	$1.2B	10%	14%	55%	3.2%	29%
HOMBHome BancShares	$1.1B	11%	17%	42%	3.7%	22%
Group median	—	9%	13%	56%	3.1%	26%

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 United Bankshares’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 equity13%

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 $3.5B on 138M shares, a 13% 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 UBSI against another business →

Cite: Owner Scorecard, "United Bankshares (UBSI), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/UBSI, data as of 2026-07-18.

Manual order: ← UBER its page in the Manual UCB →

Industry order: ← TSBK the Banks chapter UCB →