Taking stock: Pinnacle says it will soon make money in Knoxville

Also: Hedge fund bulks up on Genesco, and Central Parking sheds Canadian assets

Email | Print By Geert De Lombaerde

Pinnacle Financial Partners expects its start-up operation in Knoxville to produce its first profit this calendar year. In presentations to institutional investors today and tomorrow, CEO Terry Turner and his team detail the bank’s plans for East Tennessee, where it opened its first full-service office last spring.

By the end of this year, Pinnacle expects to have amassed $155 million in deposits and $225 million in loans. Those numbers will enable it to eke out a small profit. By late ’09, Pinnacle’s leaders are forecasting that their Knoxville division will have grown its branch network to four and recouped its start-up costs.

Elsewhere in their presentation, Turner’s team takes care to point out the declining market share of the big regional banks – both in Nashville and Knoxville – and makes the case for Pinnacle’s shares, which they say present a “great entry point” after their recent drop from $31 in September to around $24.

To view the management team’s investor presentation, click here. The Knoxville details are on page 17.

As merger mayhem raged around Genesco Inc. last fall, New York hedge fund QVT Financial was busy buying shares of the Nashville-based retailer – before selling $14 million worth at the very end of the year.

In a filing this morning with the SEC, QVT said it snapped up almost 650,000 Genesco shares in the fourth quarter. The investment house, which manages more than $11 billion, first began buying Genesco in the fall and by Dec. 28 had amassed a 10.3 percent stake. But it unloaded more than 365,000 shares before year’s end, trimming those holdings to 8.7 percent of Genesco’s share base as of Dec. 31.


And catching up with a former Nashville public company, Central Parking has sold its Canadian assets to VINCI Park, a British company that has had a Canadian presence for a decade. No price is being released for the deal, but the unit accounted for about 2.5 percent of Central Parking’s revenues. Since going private last May, the company has been shedding its international assets to concentrate on its 1.3 million U.S. parking spaces.