Central Pacific Financial Corp. has been aggressively gobbling up its own stock.

The parent of the state’s fourth-largest bank continued its repurchase program in the first quarter and has now spent about $226 million since the beginning of 2014 buying back 25.1 percent of its shares.

When shares are bought back, they are taken off the market, which increases the value of all remaining shares. Typically a company buys back its stock when management thinks the shares are undervalued. Central Pacific’s share price has climbed 17.1 percent since the company began repurchasing stock in 2014.

Central Pacific’s stock buyback represents another turning point for the once-troubled bank that has now put together 17 straight profitable quarters following $703.1 million in losses from 2008 to 2010.

The bank’s eighth straight quarter of double-digit loan growth helped Central Pacific’s earnings increase 6.1 percent in the January-March period to $10.4 million, or 29 cents a share. That compares with net income of $9.8 million, or 23 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter.

"Those (repurchase) transactions started, in part, when the bank returned to profitability," Central Pacific Chairman and CEO John Dean said Wednesday ahead of Thursday’s earnings release. "It was the buildup in earnings that started 17 quarters ago that resulted in us being in a position of having excess capital."

The share buybacks, as well as restarting dividend payouts in September 2013, have helped return value to shareholders. Last quarter, the bank repurchased 473,829 shares of common stock at a total cost of $9.3 million, or an average cost of $19.64 a share. The bank is keeping its quarterly dividend payout at 12 cents a share, which equates to an annualized yield of 2.04 percent.

"We don’t need (all the bank’s current) capital to continue to grow loans," Dean said. "We’ve had good loan growth over the last four years. Total assets have not grown, but you’ve seen the shifting of the investment portfolio to the loan portfolio."

Loan growth continued to be strong last quarter and rose 10 percent to $2.97 billion from $2.7 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

"We’ve seen some increased refinancing of loans because of the low interest rate environment, particularly in residential mortgage, while we’ve added loans to the portfolio," said Lance Mizumoto, co-president and chief banking officer. "We saw some paydown on loans on our commercial real estate side from the previous quarter, but they were up over 30 percent from the same time last year. And we have strong growth on our business loans."

The bank, which had $496 million in nonperforming assets when Dean took over in March 2010, continued its rapid improvement in that area. At the end of the first quarter, Central Pacific’s nonperforming assets — loans 90 days or more delinquent — were down to $40.8 million, a 24.6 percent decline from $54 million in the year-earlier quarter.

The bank said improving trends in credit quality prompted it to return $2.7 million to its income statement last quarter that it had set aside for potential loan losses. In the year-earlier quarter, the bank returned $1.3 million to its income statement for similar reasons.

Central Pacific also showed improvement in its net interest income — the spread between the bank’s loan and deposit rates — which rose 1.2 percent to $36.2 million from $35.8 million in the year-earlier period due to strong loan growth. The bank’s net interest margin slipped to 3.28 percent from 3.31 percent as loans continue to reprice and the rates come down.

Noninterest income, which includes service charges and fees, rose 10.3 percent to $11.2 million from $10.1 million.

Deposits rose 5.1 percent to $4.19 billion from $3.99 billion while assets increased 2.9 percent to $4.97 billion from $4.83 billion.

Central Pacific’s stock rose 35 cents to $23.52 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.