Prudential plc

Good afternoon from Hong Kong. Could I please first ask that you turn off your phones and any other mobile devices that may make a noise. But welcome. This is the Prudential's 2022 full-year Q&A session, and we're very pleased to see you all. I'd like to hand over to you now to Anil, our new Chief Executive Officer, who's got some opening remarks, and then we'll go to questions from the floor, from the phones, and then from the webcast. Anil, over to you.

Thank you, Patrick. And good evening to everyone in the room. And good morning, good evening for folks who are joining us remotely. I'm Anil Vidwani, Chief Executive Officer of Prudential PLC. And it indeed is a pleasure to welcome all of you to our full year 2022 earnings call. I'm truly excited to be part of Prudential PLC. And I've known Prudential as a competitor. And I've always admired Prudential because I have competed with them in every single market that Prudential operates in. Clearly, Prudential has a lot of strengths. The brand, the rich history of 175 years, great distribution, diversification. The trust and confidence of 18 million customers, clearly a lot of strengths. And as I said, in every single market, they were a formidable competitor. What I get to the table is 32 years of experience in financial services. The last five have been in Asia leading a competitor both on the asset management as well on the insurance side. So I have operating experience in many of the markets that Prudential operates in and have a fair amount of knowledge in terms of both the opportunities and the challenges in the markets of Asia in specific. This evening, this morning, I have the pleasure of introducing my management team. So on my right, James Turner, CFO. Next to him is Dennis Chan, who runs Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. Avnish Kalra, next to Dennis, our chief risk officer, chief risk and compliance officer. On my left is Lillian. Lillian Ang runs Greater China. Somaz Alton runs Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. Obviously, manages our joint venture partnership in India, Africa, and also is responsible for digital and technology. And next to Somaz is Wai Kong. Wai Kong is our CEO of our captive in-house asset management company, eSpring. And together, we will be responding to your questions, and I really look forward to the interactions this morning, this evening. At this juncture, I also wanted to extend my sincere gratitude to Mark, who is in the room with us. Mark has been absolutely superb in terms of his contribution over the last six years, but more specifically in the last 12 months. And his leadership has been instrumental in putting Prudential in a position of strength as we look to addressing the growth opportunities, specifically in the high-growth, high-potential markets of Asia and Africa. So on that note, I'm going to turn it back to Patrick, and we can get rolling with the question and answers.

Thank you. Patrick. Thank you, Anil. And maybe I'd like to invite the moderator just to give the instructions as to how you can lodge your questions if you're on the phone or on the webcast. Okay, in the absence of that specific instruction, I think it's hash one if you're on the phones to make yourself known on the phones to log your question. We do have a logging system so we will be able to track you. So maybe we can start by going to the floor of the room and if you want to put your hand up and just identify yourself and your organization, we'll hand a mic around and then we'll go and do some questions from the floor in the first instance. Michael was early. Thomas was next. Thomas goes first.