FIRST COMMUNITY CORP /SC/

Additional information required under this Item 8 may be found under the accompanying Financial Statements and Notes to Financial Statements under Note 26.

MANAGEMENT’S REPORT ON INTERNAL CONTROL OVER FINANCIAL REPORTING

Our management is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting. Internal control over financial reporting is defined in Rule 13a-15(f) promulgated under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as a process designed by, or under the supervision of, our principal executive and principal financial officers and effected by our board of directors, management and other personnel, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and includes those policies and procedures that:

Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

Our management assessed the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2025. In making this assessment, our management used the criteria set forth by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (“COSO”) inInternal Control—Integrated Frameworkissued in 2013.

Based on that assessment, we believe that, as of December 31, 2025, our internal control over financial reporting is effective based on those criteria.

Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm

To the Shareholders and the Board of Directors of First Community Corporation:

Opinion on the Financial Statements

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of First Community Corporation (the “Company”) as of December 31, 2025 and 2024, the related consolidated statements of income, comprehensive income, changes in shareholders’ equity and cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2025, and the related notes to the consolidated financial statements (collectively, the “financial statements”). In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2025 and 2024, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2025, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

Basis for Opinion

These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company’s management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company’s financial statements based on our audit. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audit in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. The Company is not required to have, nor were we engaged to perform, an audit of its internal control over financial reporting. As part of our audit we are required to obtain an understanding of internal control over financial reporting but not for the purpose of expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting. Accordingly, we express no such opinion.

Our audit included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audit also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical Audit Matters

The critical audit matters communicated below are matters arising from the current period audit of the financial statements that were communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relate to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matters below, providing separate opinions on the critical audit matters or on the accounts or disclosures to which they relate.

Allowance for Credit Losses

As described in Note 2 and Note 4 of the financial statements, the Company reported a loan portfolio, net of deferred fees, of approximately $1.3 billion and related allowance for credit losses (“ACL”) of approximately $13.8 million as of December 31, 2025. Expected credit losses are measured on a collective basis using a non-discounted cash flow methodology with probability of default (“PD”) and loss given default (“LGD”) for all loan segments.

Loans not sharing similar risk characteristics are evaluated on an individual basis. Due to the minimal amount of default activity and limited charge-off history, the Company has elected to use index PDs and LGDs comprised of rates derived from other community banks in place of the Company’s historical PDs and LGDs. The Company utilizes reasonable and supportable forecasts of future economic conditions when estimating the allowance for credit losses on loans. The calculation includes a 12-month PD forecast based on the peer index regression model comparing peer defaults to the national unemployment rate, followed by a straight-line reversion to long term historical peer loss rates over a 12-month period. Additionally, the allowance for credit losses calculation includes subjective adjustments for qualitative risk factors that are likely to cause estimated credit losses to differ from historical experience.

We identified the Company’s estimate of the allowance for credit losses as a critical audit matter. The principal considerations for our determination of the allowance for credit losses as a critical audit matter related to the high degree of subjectivity in the Company’s judgments in determining the qualitative factors, model assumptions, forecasts and forecasting periods. Auditing these complex judgments and assumptions by the Company involves especially challenging auditor judgment due to the nature and extent of audit evidence and effort required to address these matters, including the extent of specialized skill or knowledge needed. The primary procedures we performed to address this critical audit matter included the following:

/s/Elliott Davis, LLC

Firm ID:149

We have served as the Company’s auditor since 2006.

Charleston, South Carolina

March 16, 2026** **