You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: As always, we appreciate your interest in Central Pacific Financial Corporation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is top of mind for all of us.
Overall, the state of Hawaii is doing a good job at managing and containing the pandemic.
Hawaii was early to put in place stay-at-home orders and mandatory curfew then quarantine.
Our residents in general are abiding by government orders, as well as hygiene recommendations.
Due to our geographic isolation, Hawaii was able to effectively lock down and protect the state from outside visitors with potential COVID-19 infections.
We believe these measures will slow and contain the spread of COVID-19 in the state and result in a faster recovery.
However, with a complete tourism shut down in Hawaii, we are seeing a dramatic impact on the state's economy.
We are hopeful that we will start to see visitors returning to the island in the late summer to early fall of this year, particularly from Asia as they are closer to recovery from the pandemic.
Central Pacific Financial is committed to supporting our employees, customers and community during this time of crisis.
Our first focus is on our employees.
And therefore we have temporarily closed 13 of our smaller branches to allow for adequate social distancing and our larger remaining branches.
The staff from the temporarily closed branches have been redeployed to work at the remaining branches, assist other areas of the bank or make customer telephone calls.
The majority of our support staff, even at the executive level, have started working remotely on a full-time or rotating basis.
We believe the actions we have taken to date will allow us to meet the needs of our customers and community while ensuring the safety of all employees.
We want to assure you that we are prepared to handle this crisis.
I personally led companies through prior crisis, including the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and radiation after-effects while I was in Tokyo leading IBM, Japan and the SARs outbreak in 2002 to 2004 while I was leading BEARINGPOINT ASIA PACIFIC.
Additionally, many of our key team members that helped us through the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis remain with the company and are applying the valuable lessons learned.
Despite COVID-19, our RISE2020 initiatives are continuing.
The revitalization of our building headquarters is proceeding as we continue to support the local construction industry.
We are also pushing ahead with our digital initiatives, including the development of our new online and mobile banking platforms and the replacement of our ATMs. Digital technology is even more critical to our business during crises like this and will remain a high priority strategy for our future.
As a result, we have not had any disruption in our business.
As Paul noted, our remote workforce plan has been rolled out with an overall smooth transition.
We already have virtual private network, VPN technology capability over the last quarter.
And we've expanded VPN access to over 70% of our employees.
In addition to VPN, we are well set up with the latest technologies and enable our operations to continue efficiently.
Our teams are using collaboration tools, including Microsoft Team and several other cloud-based software program.
For our customers, we continue to offer our current online and mobile banking tools and we are making good progress on our new digital offerings as part of our RISE2020 initiatives.
Banking is deemed an essential service and I've been so proud of how our CPB employees have risen to deliver exceptional service in these challenging times.
I'd like to reiterate that our employee and customer safety is of the utmost priority.
We are monitoring our employees' health and well-being very closely.
We are providing personal protective equipment for our frontline staff and have implemented precautionary measures to ensure social distancing in our branches and all work areas.
During the first quarter, our teams remained focused on generating revenue even as the pandemic situation began to escalate.
The Bank grew total loans by $63 million or 1.4% sequential quarter.
The loan growth primarily came from our residential and commercial mortgage loan categories.
We were also able to grow core deposits by $45 million or 1.1% sequential quarter.
Additionally, we were successful in reducing the average cost of total deposits by 5 basis points to 36 basis points.
Going forward, we believe, there are still opportunities for loan and deposit growth as our teams collaborate together to support our consumer and business customers through this unprecedented time.
We have also moved quickly to put in place a number of COVID-19 relief programs for our consumer and business customers.
For our customers, we are offering an employment disruption loan, as well as, consumer and residential mortgage loan payment deferral programs.
For our business customers, we are an SBA approved lender and are participating in the paycheck protection program for PPP, which is part of the Federal CARES Act.
We've seen tremendous demand for the paycheck protection program and have made over 4200 loans totaling nearly $490 million approved by the SBA.
As a result of the PPP loan demand, it was necessary to redeploy employees to handle and assist with the loan processing, including augmenting the loan process by engaging outside resources to assist.
Our PPP team is focused right now to fund the loans that were approved by the SBA, as well as, to prioritize remaining applications that did not get processed in time under the initial funding and of course to submit the applications to SBA when the lender portal reopens.
We are staying in close contact with our customers through increased outreach efforts.
Our bankers are having calls with their key customers as frequently as daily.
W are monitoring our customers' financial health during this challenging time and are providing guidance and the resources they need to help them weather the storm.
Furthermore, we are prudently making loan modifications for certain commercial customers to allow for deferral of loan principal and/or interest for short-term period.
As of April 16, we have made loan payment deferrals on approximately $300 million in total balances which represent less than 7% of our total loan portfolio.
Central Pacific Financial has had a prudent credit risk management philosophy, which we believe will help us weather through this pandemic.
Following our recovery from the Great Recession, we implemented a disciplined approach to credit that included tighter underwriting standards with a focus on making quality loans and maintaining a diversified portfolio.
Our loan portfolio today is well diversified by product and by industry.
While, certain industries we lend to will be impacted by the pandemic, there are other industries and portfolios that we expect to have limited impacts.
The primary industries that will likely experience impacts from the pandemics are summarized on Slide 9 and include accommodation and foodservice, retail trade, wholesale trade, manufacturing and healthcare.
This comprises approximately $378 million or 8% of our total loan portfolio.
A large portion of these balances are to well-established businesses that have weathered through the last downturn.
Secondary industries that may also experience impacts include real estate management and other leasing, transportation, professional and administrative and other industries and services that total approximately $487 million or 11% of our total loan portfolio.
These industries have thus far experienced little impact from COVID-19.
Additional details on our primary and secondary industries can be found on Slide 10.
We also anticipate impacts on our consumer portfolio, which is approximately $560 million or 13% of our total loan portfolio.
We are actively granting 90-day payment deferrals to the borrowers.
Additional details on our consumer portfolio are shown on Slide 11.
We anticipate limited impact on our residential, home equity and investor commercial real estate loans.
The weighted average loan-to-value in these portfolio are 60%, 58% and 53% respectively.
These loans comprise of approximately $3.1 billion or 68% of our total loan portfolio.
Additional details on these portfolios can be found on Slides 12 and 13.
In the final week of March, we aggressively reviewed our commercial loan portfolio and reached out to our customers to determine the initial impacts, if any, of COVID-19 on their businesses.
Through this process, we identified borrowers that were likely to experience financial difficulty and proactively downgraded approximately $65 million in loans from past and special mention.
These loans are primarily accounted for as part of the outstanding loan balance of the primary industries previously mentioned.
It is important to note that all of these loans were performing prior to COVID-19.
As part of our assessment for the downgrade, we reviewed management-end actions taken such as closing businesses and reducing expenses, monthly cash burn and access to cash liquidity and capital and the overall ability to weather through the pandemic in the near term.
We further note that it is still early to reach any firm conclusions and that these loans that were downgraded do not include the expected positive impact from the federal subsidy program.
We are proactively working with our customers and many have already applied and have been approved for the paycheck protection program.
Furthermore, we have also provided assistance with short term payment deferrals as necessary.
Additional details and breakdown by industry can be found on Slide 14.
Overall, our asset quality continues to remain strong.
On the finance side, we have implemented several steps to effectively manage through the current environment.
We will ensure our capital and liquidity positions remain strong.
Through our past experience, we have developed robust capital and liquidity stress tests and comprehensive capital and liquidity contingency plans.
We also decided to temporarily suspend our share repurchase program.
To manage our expenses, as well as protect our employees, we have implemented internal policies to temporarily suspend all business travel, large group meetings, meals and entertainment.
We have also reevaluated or postponed certain consulting projects.
And finally, hiring of new employees is on an exception basis and we are evaluating our compensation plans.
I'd like to now briefly cover the company's financial results for the first quarter of 2020 which is summarized on Slide 15.
Net income for the first quarter of 2020 was $8.3 million or $0.29 per diluted share.
Return on average assets in the first quarter was 0.55% and return on average equity was 6.21%.
Our earnings were impacted by a total provision for credit losses of $11.1 million recognized in the first quarter which related to a new CECL methodology and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economic forecasts.
We also recorded a CECL day one impact of $3.6 million, which was an adjustment to our opening shareholders equity.
Our pre-tax pre-provision earnings for the first quarter was $21 million.
Net charge-offs in the first quarter totaled $1.2 million compared to net charge-offs of $2.3 million in the prior quarter.
The charge-offs primarily came from the Hawaii consumer loan portfolio.
At March 31, our allowance for credit losses was $59.6 million or 1.32% of outstanding loans.
Net interest income for the first quarter was $47.8 million, which was relatively flat on a sequential basis and the net interest margin remained stable at 3.43%.
First quarter other operating income totaled $8.9 million compared to $9.8 million in the prior quarter.
The decrease was primarily due to lower mortgage banking income and BOLI income, driven by market volatility during the quarter.
This was partially offset by additional fee income of $1.3 million related to an interest rate swap for a commercial real estate client.
Other operating expense for the first quarter was $36.2 million, which was flat to the prior quarter.
Included in the total, there was lower deferred compensation expense due to market volatility, which was offset by higher provision on off-balance sheet credit exposures under CECL.
The efficiency ratio increased to 63.9% in the first quarter compared to 62.8% in the prior quarter.
The increase was primarily due to the decrease in other operating income.
The effective tax rate was 25.3% in the first quarter.
Going forward, we expect the effective tax rate to be in the 25% to 27% range.
The global COVID-19 pandemic is an extremely challenging situation faced by all during this time.
We want to assure you that Central Pacific is prepared and ready to handle the situation.
We have a solid financial, credit, liquidity and capital position to enable us to weather the storm.
We remain committed to our employees, customers and the community and will continue to provide support to all of these areas.
Earlier this month, we ran a highly successful community campaign sponsored by our CPB foundation called KeepHawaiiCooking.
Through this program, our foundation subsidized the cost of 10,000 take-out meals to local families struggling during this time.
The purchase of these meals also provided a much needed support to our local restaurants.
We are further looking at other potential initiatives to help our local economy, one of which is the campaign to continue communication and engagement with visitors, particularly from Japan to keep Hawaii top of mind and encourage their return to Hawaii once the pandemic ends and recovery occurs.
To conclude, we are very focused on flattening the curve with the COVID-19 situation and we are pulling together the company and communities to beat this.
At this time, we'll be happy to address any questions you may have.

user
compname reports q1 earnings per share $0.29.
q1 earnings per share $0.29.
net interest income for q1 of 2020 was $47.8 million, compared to $45.1 million in year-ago quarter.
recognized total credit loss expense of $11.1 million in q1 under cecl methodology.

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