T. Rowe Price tells shareholders it’s going strong

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The president and CEO of T. Rowe Price Group used the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting Thursday to tout the investment firm’s strong performance in 2014 and early 2015.

“Our balance sheet remains rock solid,” James A.C. Kennedy said at the firm’s Owings Mills headquarters.  The firm ended March with no long-term debt and about $5 billion in stockholder’s equity, he said.

Net revenues stood at more than $1 billion for the first quarter, an increase of 8 percent over last year, and the firm reported  $747 billion in assets under management for 2014, Kennedy said.

While the year has been off to a good start, Kennedy identified several potential trouble spots that could impact the market down the road.  One is an inevitable rise in interest rates, he said after the meeting.

“We don’t know when they’re going to come, and how aggressively they’ll come when they come, but they’re coming,” Kennedy said. “We’ll find out who will get hurt.”

Economic troubles in Europe, particularly in Greece, were also a concern, as was the unpredictability of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If he gets more and more caught in a corner, what does he do?” Kennedy asked.

T. Rowe Price executives also reassured stockholders about the firm’s cybersecurity defenses after inquiries from a pair of stockholders during the meeting

The firm has a “recovery” data center more than 52 miles from its main center and which can restore all of T. Rowe Price’s data if the main system goes down, said Edward Bernard, the firm’s vice chairman.  The firm can also easily moves some operations, such as its trading desk, by accessing them at different computers in different locations.

But all big banks and brokerage firms are targets for cyber attacks, Kennedy said. “We get probed, we get attacked,” he said. “[But] we work hard to stay in touch with the best of the best, both in Washington as well as in New York, so we’re on the leading edge, as much as we can, in terms of defending ourselves.”