First Bancorp is paying $166 million, priced off its own $64.22 close, to buy Florence, South Carolina’s First Carolina Bancshares and its bank subsidiary, Carolina Bank & Trust. The merger agreement, signed Tuesday, splits the consideration into $40 million cash and 1,967,017 shares of First Bancorp stock, unanimously approved by both boards.
Carolina Bank & Trust is privately held, so there’s no unaffected share price to benchmark a premium against. What First Bank actually gets: $831 million in assets, 14 branches across northeastern South Carolina, and a bank chartered in 1936 with a relationship-lending model CEO Adam Currie says mirrors First Bank’s own.
First Bank has run this play before. Its 2016 purchase of Greensboro’s Carolina Bank Holdings, a separate company despite the near-identical name, closed in March 2017 on a 75%-stock, 25%-cash structure and gave First Bank its foothold in the Piedmont Triad. It’s the sequel: consolidate deposit share state by state, then digest before the next bolt-on.
The acquisition pushes First Bank’s balance sheet from $12.9 billion past $13.7 billion and lands it in the top 10 for deposit share across both Carolinas, per June 2025 FDIC data. Regulators and First Carolina shareholders still have to sign off, with closing targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026 or early 2027. First Bank reports second-quarter earnings July 22, when Currie will likely field the first questions on integration costs.
— Diana Kowalski