Prudential plc

Hello everyone and welcome to the Prudential PLC 2022 half-year results call. My name is Seb and I will be the operator for your call today. There will be an opportunity for Q&A. You can submit your question via the webcast or if you're listening on the phone, you can press star 1 on your telephone keypad to submit a question. I will now hand the floor over to Mark Fitzpatrick to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everyone to our 2022 half year presentation from our officers here in Hong Kong. I'm Mark Fitzpatrick and I'm joined here in person by several members of our leadership team and by a number of our Hong Kong based analysts. From the Prudential team, we have James Turner, our Group CFO and Avinash Kalra, our Group Chief Risk Officer and Compliance Officer. We also have the managing directors of our three strategic business groups. Here with us in the room is Lillian Ng, responsible for Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as overall distribution capabilities. And then joining us remotely from Singapore is Dennis Tan, who heads up Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Solmaz Altun, who's responsible for the remaining country markets, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. And he also has responsibility for our digital and technology functions. And then also Sekwai Kwong, chief executive of eSpring. So I appreciate this is a very busy day for many of you, and we'll close this session just before top of the hour. But very briefly before we go into Q&A, just a couple of key points I'd like to highlight from the half year. So firstly, it was a resilient set of results. AP sales were up 9% to $2.2 billion, reflecting diverse source of growth due to our geographic footprint, product mix, and distribution channels. AP sales in Southeast Asia and in Greater China are now both at about $1 billion. New business profit was flat year-on-year when you exclude economic effects, and it was down 5% to $1.1 billion following differences in country and channel mix and the impact of higher interest rates. And the jaws could be attributed approximately a third to each of those factors. IFRS Group operating profit was up 8% to $1.7 billion. And our resilient operational performance is testament to our multi-channel, digitally enhanced distribution platform and our strong franchise across Asia and Africa, where we are top three player in 11 Asian life markets. And the quality of our business is strong, as evidenced by the high customer retention rate that we published today. And we are looking to drive growth through a focus on operational delivery, writing quality health and protection business, and by investment in people. And therefore, our management priorities are around distribution, digital, business quality, people. And in distribution, it means we're expanding our distribution channels and driving higher productivity across both our agency and banker channels. In digital, we are embedding digital into our sales and servicing process to deliver a superior customer experience and to enhance operational delivery. And we are focused on maintaining the quality of our business, and we continue to build leadership-bent strength and building capabilities of our people through ongoing training and development. And we're also very pleased to announce two new non-executive directors today as well. And so we are confident of continued growth. Customer demand continues to be strong. Our index monthly sales were up 13% in July this year. And our latest Hong Kong border survey, which is included in the appendix to the slides, continue to show very high intention to purchase insurance. And importantly, we see that long-term structural growth drivers remain intact. driven by urbanization, growth in middle class and their corresponding wealth, and rising demand for health and protection. And we remain confident that Prudential has a financial resilience, capital strength, and capability to meet the growing health and saving needs of our customers in Asia and Africa. So with that, Patrick, I thought let's start the Q&A session, and maybe we can start with questions here in the room in the first instance, please.

Thank you. Maybe we can start with Michael.